


Tongues of Men and Angels

by Mad_Maudlin



Category: SGA - Fandom, Stargate SG-1
Genre: AU, Ableism, Action/Adventure, Don't Ask Don't Tell, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, M/M, Tok'ra
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-23
Updated: 2010-01-22
Packaged: 2017-10-06 15:01:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 58,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/54934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mad_Maudlin/pseuds/Mad_Maudlin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When SG-4 is ambushed offworld, an injured Major John Sheppard must put his trust in a Tok'ra agent named McKay to survive. But what secrets is McKay keeping about his mission, the planet, and his own motives for helping John?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> All hail Linnet, queen of betas, long may she reign. This longassed thing is the result of National Novel Writing Month, unemployment, and my SGA Santa recip's request for plot. CA, this is probably more plot that you actually wanted, but I hope it meets your expectations. The title is from First Corinthians 13, a chapter better known for its ruminations on faith, hope and love.
> 
> This fic now exists as a [podfic](http://community.livejournal.com/sgapodfic/152617.html) courtesy of Constance B, and a [podbook](http://community.livejournal.com/amplificathon/466921.html) thanks to Cybel.

John woke up in darkness, and it took a long time to recognize the squishy-brain feeling of some really, really good drugs. He could make out soft lights, soft shapes, but his eyes wouldn't focus; somewhere he thought he heard someone else breathing, but it might've been a blurred echo of his own. He hardly seemed to be inhabiting his own body and it was a struggle just to put two thoughts together. Had he been captured? Who would've captured him? P96-402 was supposed to be uninhabited--

He tried to sit up, and suddenly snapped back into himself: pain exploded through his body, every nerve lighting up, every inch of him aching and burning. Somebody moaned. It might've been him. "Kharoush?" he heard, a long way away, but stars burst in front of his eyes and then he was gone again.

For a while he might've dreamed, dark shapes and bad feelings without substance or structure. The next time he woke up, the drugged feeling was not longer quite so intense; he was aware of a constellation of hot spots across his body—not quite painful, not with the medication, but balanced precariously on the edge. Even the slightest tensing of his muscles, even _breathing_ sent warning flares shooting across his nerves from arms and legs, stomach and shoulders. His head was pounding fiercely; he was nauseated; one leg was alarmingly numb below the knee. Even with his eyes closed, the world around him was very gently spinning.

He'd been shot at least twice in his stomach, he decided, based on the burning feeling that radiated deep into his muscles. At least once in the chest, too, maybe once in the back—shot, that was right, ambushed over an hour into the mission. They had been attacked on an uninhabited planet, while Hughes had his nose in his instruments, while Sumner was bitching about getting sent on another nature walk, while Garcia was looking the other way.

Sumner had been shot in the face before he finished a sentence. That had been all their warning before Jaffa had come boiling out of the trees. It was also the last thing John remembered.

He listened carefully, but there was no sign of anyone else in the...wherever he was. Just wind and distant bird song, the sounds of the outdoors. When he dragged his eyes open the first thing he saw was a white wedge of doorway covered by a sheer curtain, glowing with sunlight and rippling in the breeze. He had to look away from that door if he wanted his eyes to adjust to the dimness of the rest of the room, but looking away meant turning his head to his other side, meant white spots in his eyes and redoubled pounding inside his skull and a spike of nausea that made his abs spasm painfully. _Concussion,_ he thought, but the word wandered around his mind for a while before it connected to anything, and it didn't exactly help.

He closed his eyes and spent a little while treading water against unconsciousness. Time stretched out and squirmed away from him, even measured in careful, shallow breathing, and the throbbing in his head and stomach refused to retreat. It was tempting to just go to sleep again, to let the pain and nausea pass him by, but they'd been attacked and he needed to know the location of his team mates. Whatever was left of them. He forced his eyes open, willed them into focus.

He found himself looking at a panel of golden metal etched with ornate hieroglyphs, about an inch from his nose. Goa'uld writing. He was on a Goa'uld ship. Just great. _Never been a prisoner of war before,_ he thought, and let his eyes fall shut again.

The third time he regained his grip on consciousness—and knew himself to be conscious, not lost in murky dreams—his head was facing to the left again. That meant somebody had moved him, though he didn't remember being touched. The doorway was dark now, and the dingy brown curtain across it hung limp—nightfall or a closed door? A small white crystal in the middle of the floor glowed like a lantern, throwing some light on the rest of the room—about ten meters across at the widest point, with a high ceiling, filled with a jumble of odd debris. Cargo crates, he decided, and broken pieces of metal and machinery that must've come from the yawning black gaps in the walls themselves. He was in some kind of cargo area. Not exactly a jail cell, though of course he wasn't exactly in any shape for a jail break. Maybe his captors just weren't very smart.

The curtain moved with a hiss, and John shut his eyes again. He listened as someone else came into the room, someone breathing heavily and walking with a loud, thumping tread; there was a momentary sound of rain from the outside, a muted grumble of thunder, quickly cut off. Also a sloshing sound, and a thump, like a bucket of water being set down. More stomping around the room, and indecipherable muttering in a man's voice. From the odd additional rattle, the newcomer was kicking at the debris that littered the floor, mostly on the far side of the room from where John lay. There was one very loud crash and an indignant "Oh, come on—" quickly cut off. John caught a whiff of smoke.

This was followed shortly by the sound of boiling water, the crackle of plastic, and smell that was almost, though not quite, exactly like a freshly-opened box of corn flakes. Supper time, apparently.

He listened to a little more clattering and puttering—this guy apparently had no reason to keep quiet, but no particular reason to make a lot of noise, either. There was more plastic snapping, some vague grunts and slurping sounds. After a few moments, the footsteps started again, moving around back and forth across the room. Eventually, they starting coming back towards John.

He he reflexively fisted his hands in the thin blanket under him. Not that he could exactly start a fight—he wasn't sure he could even lift a gun, much less aim it—but there was a principle to the thing. He wanted to know who exactly had him completely in their power and what they meant to do with him. Since the last known inhabitants of the planet were a load of trigger-happy Jaffa, he wasn't real optimistic about his prospects.

The footsteps stopped suddenly about foot away. "Oh, no no no no no," the man said, rapid as gunfire. "Whatever it is you think you're about to try, just don't, okay?"

Damn. John squinted up at the figure silhouetted above him. "Or what?" he croaked through his dry throat. "You'll kill me?"

The man snorted. "That would be completely counterproductive after all the effort I put into saving you." He crouched down at John's side, and the change in angle suddenly cast dim illumination on his face: broad forehead, a strong chin, sharp nose, dark hair that receded into a stark widow's peak. No forehead tattoo, though; just an anxious expression and a bruise on his temple. He pulled down the thin blanket that covered John's torso, and his mouth twisted down unevenly at whatever he saw there. John couldn't raise his head enough to get a good look at himself, though that didn't stop him from trying. "Stop that," the man said sharply. "I don't want to have to treat another collapsed lung from you."

"Doesn't feel collapsed," John observed. He hardly even felt short of breath, actually, and that was just as likely to be from the radiating pain in his chest. Shot, he remembered. He'd been shot a lot.

"And for that reason alone you should be saying, 'Thank you,'" the man declared. He pulled something out of his pocket and slipped it over the fingers of his right hand. John saw something start to glow against his palm, and tried to recoil away from it, one part training and one part reflex and one part common sense that _strange glowy space rocks are bad._ That turned out to be a very bad idea, though, and his vision sparked over from pain for a few seconds while the man yelped and grabbed at him, pushing him back down on the lumpy pallet. "Stop it! Just stop it, okay? What part of _stop it_ do you not understand?"

John didn't have the breath to answer that right away, so he could only watch as the man lifted the hand device into his line of sight. It wasn't a model he'd seen before, or at least, not that he could remember; it certainly wasn't a full-sized ribbon. "The hell is that?" he managed to wheeze.

"It's a healing device, you nitwit!" the man said with a growl. "If I wanted to torture you, I could just poke you in one of your various open wounds, couldn't I? Now, for the third time, _stop moving_ so I can treat you."

He was talking like John was the biggest annoyance ever, but he was also still looking at him with that slanted, anxious frown. When John didn't make any further attempts to escape, the man lifted the healing device and took a deep breath. With a look of fierce concentration, he waved it over John's chest, producing a faint pink glow.

It felt like...John supposed this was more or less what it would feel like if you injected Alka-Seltzer directly into a vein. It was a ferocious tingling, but painless, like half his nerves had been briefly put on mute. But when the device stopped, all the sensation came rushing back, just as bad as before. "Not real good at this, are you?" he managed to ask.

"Shut up," the man said. He tried the device on another spot, with more or less the same results, and then dropped his hands and his head with a sigh. "How do you feel?" he asked, strangely accusatory.

"I've had worse," John said as lightly as possible.

The man huffed at him. "I sincerely doubt it."

He tried the device on John's leg, the one that had heretofore been numb; this time, it worked a little too well, and feeling returned in a rush of fire. It felt like something had taken a bite out of his calf muscle or at least gnawed on it a little, but he could still wiggle his toes, so he supposed it could've been worse. He managed not to make a noise but couldn't suppress a grimace, and the man with the healing device made a small noise, sort of satisfied, even if he was still frowning.

When he traded the hand device for a sort of long silver pen, John shook his head. "No more drugs."

"What are you, a masochist?" the man asked. "You have holes where your species is not supposed to _have_ holes. You'll be in agony."

"Messes with my head."

"The blunt trauma messed with your head," the man said fiercely.

John tried his best to point forcefully, despite the fact that his arms felt like jello. "Not supposed to sleep with a head injury."

That earned him an eye roll. "And I'm supposed to take medical advice from some brain-damaged...whatever the hell you are? What are you?"

"Major John Sheppard, SG-4," John offered.

"How lovely for you." He adjusted something on the pen, frowned, and adjusted it again. He bit his lip for a moment, and then gave John a penetrating look before his shoulders slumped again. "All right. While I could very easily inject you with anything I like at the moment, since we do have to stretch our supply a little longer, I'll give you a reduced dose. And if you keep trying to move around, I swear I will tie you to the _wall._ Do we have a deal?"

"Deal," John said. The man huffed at him, and pressed the pen into his elbow. The mushy-brain feeling returned with a rush of warmth, but not so quickly that John wasn't able to ask. "What's your name?"

Okay, well, so it actually came out like, "Wasserrame?"

But as his eyes slid shut, the other man answered, "McKay."

\\\\\

John woke again briefly, just long enough to drink some water and engage in exercises with an improvised bed pan that he was never telling anyone about ever. Especially not the part where McKay had to hold him up, had to hold the damn cup to his lips for him, though John drew a line when it came to assisted peeing. That was more than enough to exhaust him, and he passed out again for another untold span of hours, dreaming vague dreams that he didn't remember upon waking.

When he woke up properly, the doorway was open again, and glowing with sunlight. For a moment he couldn't see where McKay was, though he had some nagging sense he couldn't quite explain that he was somewhere nearby. Eventually he spotted a pair of cream-colored boots and trousers protruding from one of the gaping wounds in a wall. Or did he have to call it a bulkhead, since they were on a ship? "Morning," John called out.

McKay huffed at him. "It's early afternoon," he replied without emerging from his hiding place.

"Thanks." John's headache was still pretty bad, but either he was getting used to the rest of his injuries or they were marginally improving. Or possibly he was still really drugged. Either way, McKay wasn't watching, and so John carefully pushed down the blanket over his chest and felt out his wounds. They were covered in slippery, irregularly-shaped dressings, sort of like a giant Band-Aid made of cling-wrap, but he could still feel raw, irritated skin around the edges; a staff wound on his left chest, close to his heart, and one lower down on the same side, precariously close to a kidney. Two low on his stomach, too, one of which hurt like a son of a bitch to touch with even the slightest pressure. Hadn't he been wearing a tac vest? No, he remembered now—they'd stopped for a water break, and he'd seized the chance to quickly strip off his jacket because of the rising heat. You could do that kind of thing on an uninhabited planet, just like Garcia could wander away into the trees, and Sumner and Hughes could stand out in the open and argue about whether to push on or start making their way back to the gate. It was, after all, an uninhabited planet, with no signs of life larger than a rabbit for miles. It was a goddamn nature walk. You could let your guard down.

"Hey! What are you doing?"

John opened his eyes to see McKay had crawled out of the open bulkhead and was glaring at him; he had a smudge of dirt or something on his forehead, not a bruise, which made his scowl slightly less ominous than it could've been. "Seriously, on most planets people learn to stop poking thing that hurt when they are _children,"_ he added. "I have a four-year-old _niece_ who knows better than that."

"Where's my team?" John asked. "I came through the stargate with three other men."

McKay flinched and looked away. "They, uh...they're gone. Dead. In the ambush."

John shut his eyes again and concentrated on slow breathing for a moment. Not like he should've expected any different; not like he deserved it. They'd let themselves get caught flat-footed and they should've all been killed, except somehow John hadn't been, somehow he'd gotten rescued and the rest left behind...

"I couldn't save you all," McKay added in a blurt. "I, when I heard your weapons I followed the sound, but there were too many Lion Guards and you were the only one I could get to, so I...got you." He grimaced a little, and then busied himself with the jumble of tools spread out around him, picking them up and putting them down again sort of at random.

"Thanks," John said, and looked away, biting down before he said anything else.

McKay huffed. "Yeah. Well. What was I gonna do, leave you to die?"

John almost said _yeah,_ because it wasn't like any of them deserved a rescue when they were caught by surprise like that. It wasn't like a total stranger owed them anything, not against a dozen heavily-armed Jaffa on a planet no one was supposed to be on. Then he took a closer look at McKay's drab clothes, all shades of cream and sand and khaki, and something suddenly slotted into place—the clothes and the technology and the help. "You're Tok'ra, aren't you?" he asked.

McKay's demeanor changed gears like a mountain bike; he huffed a little and winced like John had hurt him. "Your powers of deduction are truly a marvel, Major Sheppard," he said. "What gave it away, the free health care or the distinct lack of rhinestones in the decor?"

"I'm still kind of new at this whole aliens thing," John said defensively. "What're you doing here? This planet's supposed to be uninhabited."

"Supposed to be," McKay echoed. "As we both found out in such dramatic fashion."

"You get shot down?" John asked, taking a second look at the debris that littered the floor.

"No, no, we enjoy landing like this," McKay growled. "Seriously, how do you tie your shoes in the morning without hurting yourself?"

"You're the one who keeps giving me drugs," John pointed out. "S'not my fault I'm stoned."

McKay selected a tool and burrowed back into the wall with a dramatic sigh. "Yes, we were shot down. The High Council had no idea any of the System Lords were even aware of this planet, let alone present in strength, so we weren't prepared for a firefight. Luckily the cloak is still functional—about the only thing that is, at the moment, and it's sucking up most of our auxiliary power—but for the time being, we're safe where we are."

"For the time being," John echoed.

"Well, we weren't exactly outfitted for a wacky camping adventure," McKay said, making something hum loudly. "Aside from tight food and medical supplies, the water recyclers are offline along with the rest of life support, hence the need to prop the doors open so we don't suffocate. And unless you count the birds that keep crashing into the side of the ship, there's not much in the way of living off the land to be done around here, so don't even ask"

Okay. Might as well go for the full sit-rep; it would keep his mind off...other things. "What about escaping through the gate?" John asked.

"What, are you feeling up for a little hike?" McKay did something that made the ship's overhead lights flicker on briefly, but otherwise the door remained the only illumination. "Forget about it. The Lion Guards' camp is between us and the gate, and now that they know the SGC is interested in this planet they've almost certainly put up a twenty-four-hour guard. Only way we're getting off this planet is flying."

"When we gonna do that?"

The lights flickered again, and McKay let out a frustrated growl. "Well, if you don't stop distracting me, about the same time that the sun runs out of hydrogen and explodes!"

John rolled his eyes. "You got a real nice bedside manner, McKay."

"What do you want? I'm not that kind of doctor."

Something about that sentence nagged at John, but he was starting to feel sleepy again, and it was hard to concentrate. "Anything I can do to help?" he asked.

"Not until you've got two functioning legs and experience programming in Goa'uld," McKay said.

"I'll keep you posted," John said, and pulled the blanket back up before closing his eyes again.

\\\\\

_In the dream he was walking along a beach, wet stones shifting under his boots; some had been rounded by years of the relentless waves, but some were fresh-broken shards with edges that could cut. The cliffs to his left were the source of the black rocks, sometimes twice his height, sometimes five times. To his right, the water rippled like mercury, too thick and slow, and one horn of a copper-colored moon was just peeking above the horizon._

\\\\\

The next few times he awoke, McKay was gone, and John didn't have much to do except poke at his injuries and think. The SGC should've sent a MALP after them, at least, when they missed their return window, but if McKay was right and the gate was under guard...well, General Landry wasn't likely to approve a rescue mission against that many Jaffa unless he had concrete proof that somebody on the team was alive, and while John wasn't sure exactly how long he'd been out, it had probably been long enough to miss any radio hails.

He was probably already listed as MIA. His father would be so proud.

When McKay did return, he was limping a little on one side and had a couple of long scratches on his hands. He caught John examining the inflamed area around one bandage and rolled his eyes. "I bet you picked on your scabs as a little kid, too," he declared. "Is there any point in telling you to stop that? Are you even capable of learning?"

"What happened to you?" John asked, nodding at McKay's hands. "Birds not as stunned as you thought they were?"

"My symbiote can heal it," McKay said, and took up the healing device again. "Speaking of which..."

"Didn't work so well the last time," John pointed out.

"You weren't even conscious the last time," McKay informed him while waving the device over John's wounds. "And it's not working because you're not strong enough."

"That hurts, McKay," John said.

"I meant physiologically," he said, drawing the word out so each syllable dripped with condescension. "You were shot about six times with staff weapons, you had a concussion, major internal bleeding, neurological damage, collapsed lung caused by a pneumohemothorax, broken bones, et cetera et cetera...this thing, it accelerates the body's natural healing processes, but you're only giving it so much raw potential to work with. Speaking of which, you need to eat something."

John was hungry in a sort of abstract way; it was more like he knew he ought to be hungry, but wasn't actually feeling it, which bothered him less than actually being hungry would've. "I guess so," he said, but McKay was already leaving to go do something else. He watched as McKay boiled some water on something like a hot plate and added it to a plastic pouch, the same stuff that smelled like corn flakes. "That smells like corn flakes," John told him.

"It's a blend of complex carbohydrates and vegetable protein," McKay said, prodded the contents of the pouch. "And it tastes like wood chips, but you need the nutrition, so try not to puke."

"But you make it sound so delicious," John muttered. Experimentally, he tried to push himself up; he got to an incline of about thirty degrees on trembling arms before his body's protest got the better of him, though getting back down hurt just as bad as getting up.

It also got McKay to squawk indignantly at him. "Hey! Did you not just hear what I said? Do you want to tear something open?" he demanded.

"I want to sit up," John said.

McKay pinched the bridge of his nose. "Look. Let me use small words for the benefit of the brain damaged here. Your body is currently too weak for me to heal artificially. That means, if you re-injure yourself in any way—if you get so much as a shaving cut—and while we're on the subject, that's something we're going to have to look into, because you are the hairiest man I have ever seen—if you injure yourself further, it will have to heal the natural way. So if you, I don't know, get a blood infection in one of those staff wounds, or tear open your spleen, or throw a clot, I can't save you. Nobody can. The medical supplies we brought on the ship are almost gone, the medical supplies I found in your kit are laughably inadequate, and I? Am an _physicist,_ not a _physician._ Do you understand the risks at play here?"

His tone was relentless, almost vicious, but he was looking at John with wide blue eyes that did nothing to cover up his anxiety. McKay was clearly afraid, afraid for John, far more afraid that he would've expected. Of course, he was down in hostile territory with a wounded man to take care of—John knew intimately how that felt, how the needs and responsibilities and what-ifs could weight down on you until you felt like choking. And by John's estimation, McKay had been at this for a couple of days already, all alone--

Well, not alone. He was a Tok'ra, so he had a partner right there in his head with him. Symbiote. Whatever. It was still a rotten situation, so John took a deep breath and told himself not to make anything worse. "All right. I'm made of glass. I get that," he said as evenly as he could manage.

"I hope you do," McKay said fiercely. He brought the pouch of protein mush over and crouched next to John's head. "And I also hope you realize that I don't enjoy this any more than you do. I have much better things to do that spoon-feed somebody with the self-preservation instincts of a retarded moth."

"Thanks," John said, or tried to, except for how he got a spoon full of protein mush in the middle of the word. It was exactly as bad as McKay made it sound, but he choked it down anyway. "Bleagh."

"I know, right?" McKay scooped up another spoonful. "Typically I like my food highly processed and fairly bland, but this is just an insult to the gastrointestinal system. I'm pretty certain I've eaten school supplies during my life that have tasted better."

"Could be worse," John offered. "I had to eat bugs once."

"Now, see, bugs are okay with the right spices," McKay said. "Tanys has had them. Once they're cooked, it's basically like a lot of tiny shellfish"

"These were still moving."

"Oh. Gross."

John choked down another bite of the mush, which was denser than mashed potatoes and more sticky than refried beans; it was like somebody had mixed sweet potato casserole with tiling grout, he decided. "Who's Tanys?" he thought to ask while he recovered from the next bite.

"Hmm? Oh, my symbiote." McKay lined up the next spoonful. "Open up."

Symbiotes again. John looked at McKay while he ate, trying to picture the alien snaked curled around his spinal cord, the one that could control his body like a puppet. Except it didn't, because the Tok'ra were supposed to be the good guys. McKay had been doing all the talking, all the touching, but any minute he could be gone, and alien could be looking out of his face. Would John even be able to tell when it happened? Maybe it already had....

"You know, you don't actually have to chew this stuff," McKay said.

Reluctantly, he swallowed. "I'm thinking."

"Well, don't. Trust me, it's even worse when it's cold."

Half a pouch of protein mush, and John started to feel sleepy again; the constantly being tired thing was already starting to get old. McKay, however, insisted on one more round with the healing device, and this time he helped John roll over onto his front so he could look at the wound in his back. John shut his eyes and let the bubbly feeling of the alien technology seep through him, along his spine and then further up, his neck, the back of his head— "I hit my head, right?" he asked, though he wasn't sure it came out clearly since his face was mashed into a folded Tok'ra jacket that served him as a pillow.

"Hmm? Oh, yeah, doozy." The device switched off, and McKay flipped John over again, way more easily than was fair. Stupid Tok'ra super-strength. "Get some sleep."

"Kay."

He was almost asleep when he thought he heard McKay whisper quietly, sadly, "Get better, all right?" But he might've been mistaken, and anyway, there wasn't much time to think about it.

\\\\\

_He walked on the beach as the moon rose. The stones were slick and wet, and in places enough water had pooled to make them slimy with green growing things. John had to go slowly and keep his eyes on his footing, straining in the dim moonlight to see his own feet. A little behind him, he heard the stones click and shift and slide._


	2. Chapter 2

The next morning John awoke to a soft clicking sound, like glass, and the traces of a dream. He found McKay working inside another bulkhead, creating a small pile of shattered crystal fragments from the wreckage inside. "This thing ever going to fly again?" he asked.

McKay started, bumping his head on the edge of the bulkhead. "Ow! And yes! It may not be able to do anything else, but I'm confident I can get this thing flying again. You see, I am kind of a genius."

"Really? I hadn't noticed." John squirmed a little on his pallet, because he was laying in an uncomfortable position but moving out of it would possibly hurt worse than staying put. McKay glared at him. "What do you want me to do over here?" John protested. "I'm bored."

"I'll find you some string to bat around, shall I?" McKay dropped the broken crystals into a box and stood up, massaging the small of his back with a grimace. True to his word, the scratches on his hands were completely gone. "Or I could just give you some more drugs."

"No, thanks." John reached under his blanket and made his routine check of his wounds, and then the familiar scan of the room, though of course from his position on the ground he couldn't see much. "I'd settle for sitting up for a little while, though."

"Sitting up?" McKay blinked at John like he'd started speaking Japanese. "What do you mean, sitting up?"

"You know. Sitting up instead of laying down," John said.

"Did you miss the part where you were recently almost dead?"

John reminded himself about making a rotten situation worse, but he was also about out of patience with McKay's high-handed lecturing. "If I have to keep laying here any longer, I'm gonna get bed sores," he said, dredging up memories of one too many stints in physical therapy. "Not to mention muscle atrophy, increased risk of blood clots, and some of these wounds might scar and permanently impede my range of motion."

"Oh," McKay said, with another blink, like none of this had even occurred to him. Maybe he'd planned to keep John packed in newspaper until he healed? "Well, um, just...just give a minute."

McKay dragged one of the random boxes over to where John lay, and then created a bulky pile of clothes and blankets and one wadded-up canvas bag that he brought over from all corners of the room. He helped John prop himself up against this arrangement and fussed over it until John glared at him. "I'm good," he declared in as threatening a tone of voice as he could manage.

"Oh, please," McKay said. "If you were left to your own devices you'd have ruptured something by now."

"I thought you had better things to do than play doctor with me," John said.

McKay's face suddenly flushed, and he pulled his hands back sharply. "Yes. Yes, as a matter of fact, I do," he said in a high-pitched voice. "So you just...sit there. Not dying. Right."

John realized what he'd said, and rolled his eyes. "Relax, McKay, you're not exactly my type," he said. _Too stocky, not enough hair, slight case of alien infestation,_ he added in his head. McKay grimaced and went back to his pile of crystals.

Sitting upright gave John a better look at the cargo hold, at least marginally. There was another door, besides the curtain-covered one, but a couple of boxes had been stacked in front of it, blocking it off. Another one of those dirty curtains had been hung in the opposite corner, and John could now clearly see another pallet, just as thin and lumpy as his own, spread out a few feet away with a blanket wadded up at one end. Otherwise there didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to the spray of debris; some things seemed to be laying where they'd fallen, while others had been haphazardly stacked about. The little hot-plate thing was balanced on several flat boxes labeled in Goa'uld, and little half-moons of clear floor had emerged around some of the biggest holes in the wall. A barrel of water about five feet tall and maybe sixteen inches across stood alone in another clear space, and a piece of what looked like nylon rope dangled from a wall with no discernible purpose. "Nice place you got here," John announced.

"Are we talking or not talking?" McKay asked from the bulkhead. "I'm confused."

John rolled his eyes, and studied the boxes some more. "What the hell is all this crap in here, anyway?" he finally asked.

"What do you mean, what is it?"

"You said we were short on supplies," John pointed out. "So what's in all these boxes you got laying around?"

McKay sighed loudly. "Most of them are empty, actually. They're supposed to be sample containers."

"Samples of what?"

"Why do you think we were on this planet in the first place?" McKay said. "You think the High Council sends operatives on sightseeing holidays?"

"So they sent you here to collect samples," John said. "Physics samples?"

"Different kinds of samples," McKay muttered.

"Sounds like a real serious mission," John said. "Very important to the war on the Goa'uld."

"And how is that any different from you, hmmm?" McKay asked, emerging just enough to glare. "The SGC send half their teams to wander around the galaxy and poke any shiny objects they happen to find. It's like you're toddlers, except there's nobody around to keep you from putting your eyes out with a pointy object."

John let his head fall back against his makeshift pillow. "Glad to know the Tok'ra have such a high opinion of us."

"The Tok'ra have a pretty uniformly low opinion of everybody except other Tok'ra," McKay said. "And I actually have my doubts about a few of them."

John snorted, which produced nothing but a sharp twinge in his abdominal muscles. Maybe that healing device was good for something after all; either that, or he'd been sleeping a lot longer than he realized. "Attitude like that, no wonder you work alone."

McKay started again, knocking his head against the bulkhead, and he dropped a crystal from his hand, where it went skittering across the floor. "I, uh," he squawked. "What?"

"Never mind," John said, leaning his head back against his make-shift pillow. "Give me a heads up if you need me to poke any shiny objects." McKay huffed at him, and for lack of anything better to do, John shut his eyes.

\\\\\

But later, it bothered him. A lot of things bothered him, like the constant pain alternating with drugged, woozy fugues, and the fact he needed help with basic bodily functions, and McKay's strangely aggressive mother-henning, and McKay's rambling monologues, and McKay's noisy eating habits, and...quite a lot about McKay, actually. He wasn't the first guy John would've chosen to be cooped up with in hostile territory, and McKay was obviously not into playing Florence Nightingale for John.

So why had he rescued him in the first place? What was he here to get samples of?

Sitting up or laying flat, John didn't recognize anything suspicious in the hold, but then again, he didn't recognize much of _anything_ in the hold—he'd only been with the SGC for about a year, and most of the alien technology he'd had a chance to look at had been Ancient, not Goa'uld. Even when McKay was away—and John didn't know what he was doing, gathering water or spying on Jaffa or collecting his samples—even then, it wasn't like John could get up and snoop around, when he still needed help to sit up. The best he could do was watch McKay like a hawk—when he could see him—and try to ask sneaky questions.

Like, "Where've you been?" when McKay came back in after one of his walkabouts, shaking rain off his sleeves.

McKay glared at him. "Out. Did I neglect to file a flight plan with you?"

"Just asking," John said. "Nasty weather to be out in."

"Well, that's sort of the idea." He stripped off his jacket and left it hanging over the corner of a box, revealing a long-sleeved, coarsely-woven shirt that was just as wet. "It's safer to be out when the Jaffa are restricting their patrols."

"Didn't realize they melted in water," John said.

McKay huffed. "Of course not, but in this weather—" He didn't finish his thought, just fished a dirty towel out of another box and rubbed at his hair with it. It didn't do much to dry him, but left him with a series of cowlicks to rival John's own.

John leaned back on his pillows, trying to figure out how McKay could give away so much without actually giving away anything. Maybe he wasn't real good at being sneaky. "Just wondering what's so important out there you'd waste your valuable time in the rain," he said.

But McKay just growled, "I doubt you'd understand," and went rummaging through boxes. John watched carefully, noting which boxes were genuinely empty as advertised, and which ones weren't—he spotted where the protein mush was stored, and a toolkit, and something he couldn't quite figure out, and a box of what looked like blankets and towels and clothes all crumpled together. From this, McKay extracted a dry jacket, and he measured it against himself before shrugging it on.

That bothered John, for some reason, though he couldn't put his finger on it right away. "Right, I forgot, I'm a toddler," he said, just to keep the conversation going.

"Well, maybe not you personally," McKay said, scooping up a cup of water out of the barrel. "Seeing as you do seem to be showing some signs of learning self-preservation. This may be the first time I've ever been a good influence on somebody."

"Since when did you get all the credit?" John asked.

"Well, seeing as I've been the one doing all the work around here since we came down, I think I _deserve_ all the credit I can take, don't you?"

That was it. Measuring the jacket like it might not fit him. Like it wasn't _his._ John looked at the second sleeping pallet stretched out beyond his feet, because if they were that short on supplies, if McKay worked alone... "Depends on what happened to your partner," John said.

McKay dropped his cup of water and doubled over with a series of hacking coughs. He looked up at John with a horrified expression; his eyes were really quite blue. "You. Uh. What?"

"Your partner," John said. "And not the one in your neck. 'Cause I'm getting the impression you didn't come here alone."

"I, um, well." McKay straightened up and cleared his throat several times more than could have possibly been necessary. "That, uh, that's actually somewhat complicated."

"Complicated," John echoed. "You want to use those short words for me again?"

McKay stood up straighter, and looked off to one side, but his hands kept fluttering around his waist, like he didn't know whether to fold them or put them in his pockets or what. "So I was going to wait to explain this until you were a little more, um, a little less...better."

"Until I was a little less better?"

"Just give me a minute, all right?" McKay raked his fingers through his hair, rearranging the cowlicks, and took a deep breath. "All right. So the first thing I should say is that I'm not sorry."

John's stomach sank. "You're not a very reassuring person, McKay, did you know that?"

"I'm not sorry," McKay said, "because it was a matter of life and death and enough people had already died on this planet. But if you know anything at all about the Tok'ra, you probably know that Tok'ra symbiotes never take a host without the host's consent. _Almost_ never."

There was a brief moment of perfect calm when John did not understand what the hell McKay was getting at. And then suddenly he _did,_ all the pieces came together, and by reflex his hand flew to the back of his neck. No wound there, not even a scar; nothing felt different. Nothing felt wrong at all "You son of a bitch," he blurted.

"You were bleeding to death," McKay said, and now he was looking John in the eye, all right; looking miserable and anxious and angry all at once. "There was nothing else I could do to save you. And Kharoush's host was dying, he couldn't heal him, and he—I— it was either let you all die or give two out of three a chance, and I already said I'm not sorry, because I'm _not,_ because you're getting better and he's...alive."

John looked at the ceiling, rather than McKay, so he wouldn't be tempted to throw himself across the room and strangle the bastard. His fists clenched at the blanket anyway, almost on autopilot. He didn't feel—well. He had no idea what it felt like to have an alien snake take up residence in your spinal column. He was still buzzed up on painkillers, his body felt like mincemeat, how was he supposed to know what else was wrong? Had that all been part of the plan? Was that why McKay had gone looking for SG-4 in the first place? "Get it out of me," he managed to growl.

McKay blinked. "Excuse me?"

"Get. The snake. Out of me," John said as distinctly as he could. "This host is not consenting. I want it gone."

"Are you crazy?" McKay asked. "Do you think symbiotes just snap in and out of place like...like machine parts? Even if Kharoush were conscious, which he is not, separating you now might kill you both!"

"How do you know it's unconscious?" John asked.

He rolled his eyes. "Believe me, Major Sheppard, if he were awake, you'd be the first to know."

That made the hairs on John's neck stand up. Of course, when the snake woke up—but the Tok'ra were supposed to be the not-so-bad guys, Earth allies—but still—_a matter of life or death—_ "What happens then?" he demanded. "I get kicked to the backseat?"

"What do you think we are, Goa'uld?" McKay asked with an incredulous disgust that matched John's own indignation.

He flopped back onto his pallet, fisting his blanket, one hand still feeling for some trace of the parasite under his skin. He was practically vibrating with anger, which hurt like hell, but he couldn't relax or break his thoughts out of a hamster wheel of _fuck, fuck, fuck._ He forced himself to take a deep, painful breath, and then another, and then a third. "So how long until I can get this thing out of me?" he ground out.

"First of all, 'that thing' is my friend, and I'd like you to show him a modicum of respect," McKay said icily, folding his arms over his chest. "Secondly, when we get out of here, which I can guarantee will _not_ be soon, I can take you to the nearest Tok'ra base, and we'll find a permanent host for Kharoush as quickly as we can. In the meantime, I'm afraid he's stuck with you for the time being."

John shut his eyes and exhaled in a hiss. The crawly feeling on his skin wouldn't go down—not when he kept returning to the image of a snake inside him, twining around bones and nerves, burrowing into his brain. But when he couldn't even sit up on his own, when he couldn't even take a piss without help..."Fine," he snapped. "The—your _friend_ can stay where he is for the time being. But I'm not happy about this."

"Well, I'm sure as hell not dancing for joy, either," McKay grumbled. He looked like he wanted to say something further, but with a twist his his mouth he turned to a random bulkhead, seized a tool and started working again, pounding on something metal far harder than was probably necessary.

John rubbed the back of his neck, still half-convinced he was going to feel a symbiote's sinuous movements under the skin any minute. He wondered how long McKay had thought he could keep that little tidbit from him, if he'd just been planning to wait until the symbiote woke up and sprang the news on John personally. He wondered what would happen when the symbiote really did wake up, if he had a clock counting down on his freedom.

He eventually let his arm drop, because it made him tired and made his chest hurt. And when McKay came over to his pallet later, he pretended to be asleep, rather than sit in awkward silence or, God help him, say anything, because he was pretty sure anything he said at this point would only further piss off the man he relied on to feed him and take away his bedpan.

At least he could rely on one thing: after this, there really wasn't any way this could possibly get worse.

\\\\\

John eventually fell asleep for real, but it wasn't restful; instead of rocky beaches, he dreamed about being a prisoner in his own body and the laughter of a malevolent alien. He might not have been with the SGC long, but he'd read all the relevant mission reports—on Kowalski, Carter, and all the other personnel who'd ever been infested. Some of them by Tok'ra, in fact. Now that John had the live experience to look forward to, he was discovering just how good his recall of minor details could really be—the paralysis, the powerlessness, the gruesome surgeries that had ultimately failed. Assuming they'd even risk pissing off the Tok'ra by resorting to surgery. Assuming they'd even know he'd been trapped, if they heard assurances in his own voice that he was fine...

The next time he woke up, the lantern-crystal was on again, and his mouth was bone dry. He could see McKay over by the other curtain, doing something with another wall panel, and had to swallow a few times before his tongue would unglue itself from his mouth. As little as he wanted to ask for anything right now... "McKay?"

"He is resting."

That peeled the last layers of sleep off of John's mind real quick. The voice was deep and resonant and totally inhuman, and when the body across the room turned towards him he caught a faint, brief golden flash around its blue eyes. "Oh," was all he could say for a minute. Also, "Hi."

"Hello, Major Sheppard," Not-McKay said, sounding faintly amused. "My name is Tanys."

"Nice to meet you," John said for lack of anything better. And because his mouth really was that dry, "I don't supposed you could get me a drink of water, could you?"

Tanys set aside his tools and went to the water barrel. "We have been waiting for you to wake up again all day. You should know you're not a very good actor."

"Sorry," he muttered. He wasn't sure what else _to_ say, now that he was addressing the symbiote that wore McKay's skin. (Maybe _no offense?)_ He watched Tanys draw a cup of water out of the barrel, watched how different his body language from McKay's—not that John had had much time to analyze McKay's gestures beyond a lot of flailing hands and rolled eyes, but there was still an obvious difference in posture, in expression, in the way Tanys carefully wiped a few beads of water off the lip of the cup before bringing it over to John. This time, John was able to sit upright long enough to sip the water himself. "Thanks."

"I should thank you," Tanys said. "You saved Kharoush's life."

John flinched. "It wasn't exactly my idea, you know," he pointed out.

"No, it was not," Tanys said gravely. "I realize it makes us little better than the Goa'uld when we take a host under duress, but the opportunity to save even one life after what happened to your comrades and Kharoush's host was...comforting. We may not regret the decision, Major, but you should know that we are grateful that you are bearing with it."

John set the cup aside and tried to find something to look at besides Tanys's face. The blanket really had a fascinating weave to it. "I guess I am, too," he finally managed to say. "For the rescue and all."

"It was quite a thrilling adventure," Tanys said with perfect deadpan.

There was no time like the present to ask the next question, as awkward as it was. "So how long do I have until Haroosh—"

"Kharoush," Tanys corrected, giving it the same rasping consonant as _challah_ and _chutzpah._

"How long until he wakes up and, you know, does his thing?" John asked.

Tanys sighed. "I really don't know. It can be a traumatic thing to change hosts suddenly, and he was already badly injured; we have the ability to fall into a deep healing trance, but that typically involves the host body as well. And it's been ten days already..."

"Already?" John asked incredulously. Time was slipping away faster than he'd thought, though he did take a degree of comfort from _deep healing trance._ "Any sign of reinforcements?"

"You know the gate is far from here, and well-guarded," Tanys said patiently. "Your people couldn't get help to us even if they had sent another team."

"What about your people?"

Tanys raised one eyebrow at him. "The Tok'ra are essentially a terrorist organization, Major Sheppard. Rarely do we risk rescuing agents who are lost on missions. When Kharoush and I do not report, we will be mourned as lost."

"Gotcha." John settled back on the pallet, and Tanys took the cup back; he noticed there were some new scrapes across the knuckles of McKay's hands, before he went back to the water barrel, stepping carefully over the debris instead of kicking it out of the way. McKay was asleep somewhere inside that head, totally unconcerned with what Tanys might or might not be doing. Of course McKay wasn't concerned. McKay had chosen this.

"If you wish to speak to Rodney, I can rouse him," Tanys suddenly offered.

It took John a minute to figure out that _Rodney = McKay._ He blamed the residual painkillers. "No," he said. "No, that's fine. He's really asleep?"

"Sleep is a state of the body," Tanys said, heading back to where he'd been working. "I can keep us going on very little sleep for quite some time. Rodney's mind is what needs rest, so we take turns working. It's more efficient."

Efficient, okay, sure. Creepy as hell, but he'd go along with efficient. "You're saying you've been going without sleep for ten days?" he asked.

"Not ten days," Tanys said. "And not entirely without sleep."

Still. Angry though he was—a slow anger, now, stiff and awkward—John wasn't entirely comfortable with his sole caretaker working himself to death, either."How long can you keep this up?" he asked.

Tanys blinked at him. "For as long as is necessary," he said, like it was obvious.

"As long as you're sure," John said.

"I may not be the same caliber of engineer as Rodney, but I hardly need him to hold my hand through basic repairs," Tanys said.

"I didn't mean fixing the ship, I meant you staying awake," John said.

Tanys' expression darkened slightly. "We have much to accomplish before we can leave," he said, and bent over the open bulkhead again.

"Like _what?"_ John asked. "Collecting your samples?"

"It does not concern you," Tanys said, apparently taking McKay's cue—or vice-versa. "I realize you have little reason to trust us, Major, but all the same I hope you believe that we would do nothing that jeopardizes your safety. We, too, wish to escape this world alive."

"I don't have much of a choice, do I?" John asked.

Tanys smiled slightly at that. "Indeed not. But I hope you appreciate that, from a moral perspective, neither did we."

John didn't know what to say to that, since he kind of doubted a Tok'ra would appreciate the spirit of _give me liberty or give me death._ Instead he watched Tanys work for a few minutes from across the room, though his line of sight was partially obscured by the mess on the floor. It was the last thing he saw before he fell asleep again.

\\\\\

_He walked along the beach, sticking closer to the cliffs now that the tide was rolling in; from behind him, someone called out, "Don't worry—it won't get much higher than this."_

_"How do you know?" John called back without looking._

_"I'm a keen observer."_

_He kept to the cliffs anyway, and kept his feet dry; the footing was worse here, where the ocean didn't leave sand and grit and seaweed to settle between the stones. He slipped but caught himself, and because it was a dream there was no skinned palm, no twisted ankle._

_"Don't believe me, huh?" the voice called from down the beach._

_John didn't look back. "I'm kinda used to going it alone."_

_"I know. That's the problem."_


	3. Chapter 3

John woke up to detailed and fluent swearing, which meant that McKay was awake. The lantern crystal was off and the inside of the ship was in darkness, except for a rack of glowing crystals near where McKay was working. "Morning, sunshine," he called, sitting up gingerly again.

"Oh, don't you even start," McKay said savagely. "Don't even talk to me right now. I made breakfast." He stomped over to John, kicking a new trail from the hot plate to the pallets, and dropped a pouch of protein mush and a cup of water by John's elbow with a splash and a clatter.

"What side of the brain did you wake up on?" John asked, prodding the mush with his spoon. (It had struck him in his limited experience with stargate travel that no matter where he went in the galaxy, spoons were pretty much the same.)

"The Lion Guard are making their way up the valley," McKay declared, crouching back at the rack. "That a good enough excuse for you?"

_Lion Guard._ A memory snapped into John's head with photographic clarity, of a Jaffa with a snarling golden helmet leveling a staff at him. "How close are they?" he asked, setting the food aside.

"Too close," McKay said grimly. "I've shut down just about everything but the cloak, to mute our energy signature, but of course that means I can't track them on active sensors and I didn't have time to go around picking up the suicide birds from around our perimeter and did I mention we don't have any shields?"

"You just did." John looked around for any of his gear, careful to keep his hips and shoulders aligned to put as little strain on his abdominals as he could. He couldn't even see his boots. "How are we fixed for weapons?"

"Zat'nik'tels, stun grenades, and your boom-boom sticks, which got wet when you were attacked and are also low on ammunition," McKay said. He prodded something in the rack of glowing crystals, which made sparks fly. He swore again.

And of course John was just getting back to the point of feeding himself, and in no shape to aim a rifle even if he had anything to fire from it. "So what do we do if they find the ship?"

"Die, most likely." He did something else that John couldn't see clearly, and shouted, _"Ha!"_ The lantern crystal suddenly flickered on, but instead of projecting mere light, it threw up a hologram. After a moment, John realized it was a three-dimensional map, and it took a moment longer to place what he was looking at: the mountains that surrounded P96-402's stargate. The map was focused on a particular valley, which funneled a river down towards to where SG-4 had been ambushed, but judging by the blinking icons John guessed that McKay's ship was much further up, in the krummholz. The rest of the markers were well below them, but true to McKay's word, they were moving uphill. "Passive sensors," McKay explained, crawling over to the hologram. "Just had to replace the right control crystals. Oh, this is bad."

"How'd they find us?" John asked. "The cloak?"

"How should I know?" McKay snapped. "They could've detected our energy signature. They could've followed my backtrail. They could've extrapolated the trajectory of the crash from their instruments. It could be a total freaky coincidence! I mean, yes, most Jaffa have the same analytical skills as a loaf of bread, but even they can be lucky from time to time."

"So what's the plan?" John asked.

"I don't have one!" McKay squawked, and raked his hands through his hair again. "Just give me a minute, okay?"

"Have we got a minute?" John asked. The Lion Guards on the hologram were inching higher, though not with any particular speed; still, it was hard to judge the scale, and John had no idea when they'd get within line of sight of the ship. And one of Sumner's favorite lecture topics for him had been Never Underestimate a Jaffa, which had involved sitting in on a few of Teal'c's ass-kicking lessons. It was one of the few of Sumner's rants that John ever paid attention to, and not just because it hadn't had anything to do with John's general failures as an officer and a gentleman.

McKay suddenly straightened up, and his eyes flickered gold—barely perceptible against the glow of the hologram. "I will be back shortly," Tanys said, and snatched something off the floor before heading for the doors.

"Hey!" John called, "Mind cluing me in on the plan here?" But Tanys ignored him, and then he was gone, and John could only slap the wall in frustration. Running off into the middle of a fight without so much as a by-your-leave, and John stuck here on his ass...he had a sudden burst of sympathy for his ex-wife.

Standing was right out of the question, he discovered, but he could prop himself semi-awkwardly against the wall, the better to watch the hologram. The icons of the Jaffa were in red, tagged with jumbled Goa'uld script; the ship was in white, and John had to assume that meant Tanys/McKay was the yellow one in motion. He had climbed partway up the ridge above the valley and was now moving parallel to it. It looked like he was trying to get behind the Jaffa, except he was moving a lot slower, so of course they were going to pass him and possibly cut him off from the ship any minute...

Except Tanys suddenly stopped. A moment later, so did the Jaffa, the order appearing to spread raggedly across their line. Soon they were all converging, not on McKay's location, but somewhere just below it...a shift in angles suddenly showed John with clarity that McKay was perched above a steep drop-off, conveniently placed above what looked like the mouth of a shallow cave. He didn't have time to study the layout before the map rotated again, obscuring the positions. "Don't you come with a remote?" John growled.

Suddenly several of the Jaffa icons winked out, all at once. And the McKay icon was running hell for leather back towards the ship. John held his breath, but it looked like none of the remaining Jaffa were pursuing. So whatever the hell he'd done, it had worked as a temporary distraction, at least. Well done, Tanys. Now if only John knew what the hell had actually _happened!_

By the time McKay made it back to the ship, breathing hard and drenched in sweat, John had eaten his protein paste mostly for lack of anything better to do. And also because he was kind of starving. "Nice work," he called out with a wave of his hand. "Your TV sucks, though."

McKay just wheezed at him for a moment and slumped against the door. John guessed that at this point, it really was McKay—Tanys hadn't struck him as particularly easy to rattle. Nor was Tanys very easy to read, and McKay's mouth was hanging out, his eyes shut, his face flushed scarlet and glowing with sweat. He looked a little bit like he was going to throw up once he caught his breath.

"Looks like the Jaffa are all tied up at that cave," John continued, pointing with his spoon. "What'd you do, drop a grenade on them?"

"Basically," McKay gasped. He straightened up and went for the water barrel, drinking two cups dangerously fast. "I hate this," he added mildly when he was done.

"What, being downed behind enemy lines?"

_"Having_ enemy lines," he said viciously, rapping the cup against the side of the barrel. "I'm a scientist, a _theorist._ I like _numbers._ Improvised explosive devices are a waste of my intellect."

"Wanna switch?" John asked mildly.

McKay did a comical double take at him, staring for a moment as if John had suddenly registered on an entirely different level. "How are you sitting up?" he demanded. "Who told you that you could sit up? Do you not remember the talk about healing miracles and the lack thereof in your immediate future?"

"McKay, I didn't rupture anything, chill," John said. "I wanted to see what was going on out there."

"Well, you saw all the details," McKay said wearily, setting the cup aside. "I drew them off to that, that little cave place there, and then dropped an explosive charge on them. It was powerful enough to collapse part of the cave entrance, so with any luck they'll think they found either your hiding place or mine and set off a booby trap."

"Nice thinking," John said.

"Yeah, well, it'll only work if they remain too dumb to search the debris for non-Jaffa remains," McKay grumbled, slumping to the ground. "And until they move off again, I'm stuck in here."

John shrugged. "We've got enough water for a day or two, right? Keep a lid on the chamberpot and it'll be just like home."

McKay rolled his eyes. "Oh, yes, because your military taught you to eat bugs and live in caves. Aren't you due for more painkillers?"

"Don't want any more," John said. "I'm fine."

"Please, you've still got burns over twenty percent of your body and you're healing multiple broken bones," McKay said, groping around until he found the silver medication pen again.

"They don't hurt so much anymore," John said. "And I'd rather have my head clear."

"To do what? Think about guns?" McKay frowned at the pen, then held it up to his ear and shook it. His eyes bulged wide. "Oh, no. No no no no."

John raised an eyebrow. "Are you telling me we're out?"

"Of course we're not out," McKay snapped, scanning the room frantically. "I just need to find the, uh, the thing...the thing with the stuff..." He dropped the pen on the edge of a crate and started rooting around in the mass clutter spilling out of one of the crates.

Now that he knew painkillers weren't even an option anymore, John of course felt every throb and twinge in his body. He grit his teeth and sat up as straight as he could, torn between the urge to protect his stomach and his back. "Did you even do a proper inventory when you crashed?"

"Of course I did an inventory!" McKay yelled. "I just...it's been...look, I know there's another refill around here somewhere..."

"Looks like you could stand to do another one," John said. "And since we're locked in, you've got all the time in the world, don't you?"

McKay glared at him, and set down two wads of plastic he'd been peeking under. "And what gives you the right to order me around, Major Sheppard? Hmm? I'm not part of your military."

"I'm not ordering anybody," John said, carefully folding his arms over his chest. "Just suggesting. You know, as an interested party."

"Well, suggestions are not appreciated!" McKay said, raising his chin.

"You're the one who saved me," John said. "You're the one who...who stuck yourself with me," because _stuck your partner in my neck_ was just a little too much to be joking about. "Don't tell me you're having second thoughts."

"No," McKay said, surprisingly firm. "Of course not."

"Then you better open yourself to suggestions, 'cause I don't think I'm getting much more sleep from now on," John said, and did his best to stare McKay down.

McKay rolled his eyes and sighed, even if his arms were still folded tightly. "Fine. Inventory. It's not like I've got anything better to do, between catering to your every other whim and progressing on repairs, is it?"

"You might also mop, if you've got the time," John said, which only made McKay glare at him.

\\\\\

McKay stayed inside the ship for two days, which were also the first two days that John didn't spend primarily fast asleep. If he'd thought he was bored before, he was sadly mistaken; now that dozing off into a drugged nap wasn't even an option, he reached new heights of having nothing to do. McKay made a few more half-hearted attempts to sweep the healing device over his wounds (or over the back of his neck, clearly aimed at something...some_one_ inside) but there wasn't any perceptible change. "I think Kharoush is in a coma," he declared anxiously at one point.

"How can you tell?" John asked.

"I can't," he said, "because this thing doesn't actually give that much feedback beyond 'hurt' and 'not hurt.' But if he were just in a trance, he'd have come out of it by now, and I presume you would've said something about that even if he didn't." He switched the device off and sat back on his heels. "He's still alive, though, and his vitals are stable, so until he either wakes up or we get to some more sophisticated medical facilities, there's nothing more to do."

"Great," John said. "What's that mean for me again?"

"Absolutely nothing," McKay said immediately. "Everything I said still stands. Kharoush can't actively accelerate healing if he's not actively doing anything, so you're still made of glass."

He then proceeded to freak out any time John tried anything more strenuous than sitting up, so John was still stuck on his ass on the sleeping pallet. That meant there really wasn't anything to do but obsess about the comatose symbiote lurking in his brain, or talk.

"So what's up with these Lion Guard guys?" John asked him at one point.

McKay looked up over the lip of the crate he was re-packing. "Could you be a little more specific?"

"What are they doing here?" John asked. "Uninhabited planet and all."

"No idea," McKay said. "They're servants of a minor and completely uninteresting System Lady whose territory is light-years away from here, meaning there's really no reason for her to have anything to do with this drab little rock. Their camp is set up for the long haul, though...they're not going anywhere."

"Great," John said. "Don't suppose there's a long way around to the gate?"

"That's what I was looking for when I found your team," McKay said. "And I repeat, under guard. The gate is no longer an option."

"I don't like to discard any options too quickly," John said. "If I could at least get a message back to the SGC somehow, they might send help."

McKay cleared his throat loudly. "I, uh, that's going to be rather difficult," he said, voice suddenly sweeping up to a high, nervous register.

John leaned forward as best he could. "McKay, what did you do?" he asked.

McKay ducked his head down behind the edge of the crate. "I blew up your radio."

"You _what?"_

"I needed something to lure the Lion Guard into the cave, and it was broken anyway!" he said. "I figured they'd be trying to track your radio frequencies, so I, ah, I modified it a bit and dropped it down the cave." He peered over the edge of the crate again. "And then I dropped a bomb on it."

"God damn it, McKay!" John blurted. The anger that had been banked and simmering suddenly boiled back up. "What if they're trying to contact me?"

"You don't think I know how to work a radio?" McKay asked. "There was exactly one burst of static about twelve hours after I found you, which was probably one of your probes getting blown up by the Lion Guard. No other signal made it through, not this far, not on that thing."

John shut his eyes and clenched his teeth. He knew Landry would never shed a tear for him personally, but he'd thought they'd make more of an effort for the others...Sumner was a model Marine, a model commander, and Hughes was brilliant scientist. Garcia was only twenty-five years old. He'd thought Stargate Command would come back for them. He'd thought they understood something about leaving no man behind.

"Sorry," McKay said suddenly. "I'm sorry I blew up your radio. And...stuff."

"Never mind it," John said, swallowing the rest down because it wasn't about McKay, not really. "What's done is done. You got communications on this thing yet?"

"No," McKay said. "Nor life support, nor shields, nor engines, nor fifteen other essential systems."

"Anything I can do to help?"

McKay rolled his eyes. "You might be too drugged to remember this, but we already had this conversation. No. Just shut up and look pretty, okay?"

John raised an eyebrow at him, and didn't even have to say a word before McKay blushed and started packing the crate again.

\\\\\

_"Need a hand?" his companion asked, and the voice was different but the intonation the same. Somehow he knew it was the same person, without having to look._

_John looked at the spur of black stone that jutted into the sluggish sea, cutting off one side of the beach from the other. It was going to be a hell of a thing to climb. "No, thanks," he said, putting one foot into a crack. It slipped out. "You go on ahead."_

_"I can wait."_

_He put his foot in a crack and this time it stayed, allowing him to hoist himself up the first foot or so. There was a tumble of boulders half-standing, half-submerged, and if he could climb their slippery tops he could probably get around the spur mostly dry. He felt for a dry handhold and found nothing. Found another slippery crack, another foot of height._

_"You're awfully stubborn, you know that?" the voice asked behind him._

_"I get that a lot," John said. He could just about reach the first boulder. If he stretched, he could just about get his foot into the deep groove between it and the cliff spur._

_"I could help you out," the voice repeated._

_"I'm good," John told him. His made the stretch and got his foot in the groove. Now he just had to put one arm over._

_The voice behind sighed. "I cannot decide if this is pride or if you just don't trust me."_

_"Don't need to trust you," John said, reaching over the boulder and pulling, "because I don't need--"_

_A wave came up, and water filled his face, blinding him with stinging, salty warmth. It also squirted out of the crack he was using as a foothold, and when his boot came loose there was nothing for him to hold on, nothing but stone worn glossy-smooth by the wind wand water. His fingers scraped over the stone and then he was falling, just a few feet, but falling to stone and water--_

_And landing on a dry stretch of the rocky beach. He sat up and looked around furiously. The spur was now on his other side. "What the fuck?" he blurted._

_"Don't ask me," called the voice on the other side of the cliffs. "It's your dream."_

_John climbed to his feet and hurriedly kept walking._


	4. Chapter 4

At the end of the second day, John stood up, and promptly fell down again. McKay was at his side, and panicking, so quickly that he might've been teleported there. "Easy," John managed to gasp over McKay's babbling. "Easy, just...the leg..."

"Let me see the leg!" McKay barked.

"It's not so bad," he said, though it really kind of was; his knee and ankle felt so unstable he was surprised he'd gotten as far up as he had, and his abs burned like fireworks. "Just put too much weight on it."

"And probably tore five different parts, given our luck," McKay said, and insisted on peeling back the shredded leg of John's BDUs.

It had felt for a while like something took a bite out of his calf, and now that he could get a look at it John realized that was exactly what had happened; something, probably a close-range staff blast, had burned away a thick layer of skin and muscle, so that the shiny bandage turned distinctly concave at precisely the place where it ought to have been convex. It was kind of astonishing he could even still move it.

"Don't move it!" McKay snapped as soon as John tried. "It's still very fragile!"

"Just for reference, how many pieces was I in when you got me here?" John asked quietly.

He was going for a light-hearted tone, but the question made McKay grimace. "Mostly one," he said. "You'd been staffed multiple times and fallen down a ravine into the river, so, you know, extensive third and fourth-degree burns, broken ribs and limbs and skull, and a little bit of drowning. One of your lungs had collapsed and your chest was filling up with blood, so you couldn't really breathe, either, which is why..." He trailed off without finishing the sentence. _Why I planted my friend in your head._

"Shit," John said, because for the first time he thought he could almost understand McKay's point of view.

"Yeah." McKay scratched the back of his neck nervously and added, "Nobody else saw you fall, though, and nobody saw me, so I beat the Jaffa down to where you landed and brought you back here."

John thought about the lay of the land where the ambush had happened. The river cut a gulch at least ten feet deep where they'd stopped, but it had gotten a lot deeper a lot faster further upstream; he didn't remember running that way for cover, because he didn't really remember the attack, but it would've been a logical move. Halfway a miracle he hadn't been swept away by the river, though, if that was how it had happened. Halfway a miracle that McKay had been able to haul him out of there, and back up the valley, without getting caught...and of course there would've been no way to carry him that wouldn't have exacerbated his injuries. "Must've been one hell of a hike for you," he said.

"Well, I won't say it was a cakewalk," McKay said, as he slid the healing device over his hand again. "But Tanys just happens to grant me enhanced strength, so really it was just a matter of making sure I didn't accidentally whack your head into any trees on the way up."

"Gee, Superman, what would I have done without you?" John asked. He really was only half-kidding.

McKay finished waving the device over John's leg and huffed at him. "I'm really more of a Batman fan, actually. Now, no more standing, because if you tear something I am so not qualified to perform an amputation here."

John, however, had skidded to a complete mental halt on in the first half of that utterance. He stared at McKay, and very quietly re-arranged a couple of his preconceptions. "Batman?" he echoed.

"What's wrong with Batman?" McKay asked. "He's the only major superhero who gets by on his intellect and willpower rather than some kind of genetic or biological accident. He was kind of my role model when I was a young man."

"You're from Earth?" John asked stupidly. He no longer had drugs for an excuse, either.

"What?" McKay asked incredulously, making that ow-you-hurt-me face again. "What kind of a question is that? Did you think I got this name from some lost clan of space-faring Scotsmen?"

"There's a lot of aliens with normal names," John said defensively.

McKay rolled his eyes, and offered him a handshake. "Well, I'm not one of them. Dr. Rodney McKay, Ph.D. Ph.D., so nice to meet you."

"How'd you end up with the Tok'ra?" John asked, shaking slowly.

"Blind luck," McKay declared. He stood up and brushed off his trousers. "I'm going to go, uh, check the perimeters. That sort of thing. Now that the Lion Guards are gone. Please try not to hurt yourself while I'm gone, all right?"

"Whoa, whoa, whoa," John said. "You're not walking away after that. Why didn't you say anything earlier?"

"Probably because I assumed you could guess?" McKay threw a bag over his shoulder and put a zat in his pocket. "Seriously, while I'd love to bond with you about the old homeworld, I've got more important things to do."

"Things like fixing the spaceship?" John asked.

"Lots of things," McKay snapped. "You know, checking the perimeter and stuff."

"Because you can't do that with the passive sensor thingies," John said.

McKay didn't even deign to comment; he just lifted his chin and turned his back. As he left, he called out, "I'll be back before dark."

John tried throwing a cup at him, but the burning pain in his pectoral muscles threw him off, and it clattered harmlessly to the ground a few feet from the door.

\\\\\

_The tides were crowding the cliffs now, drenching them with spray, and John was paying so much attention to his footing that he could hardly pay attention to his companion. Who was telling him, "It's your dream. You're the one who's giving yourself all this trouble."_

_"So where'd you come from?" he asked._

_"And I'm starting to suspect," the voice continued, "That you are a masochist."_

_"I've heard that one before, too," he said. "Doesn't stick."_

_"At the very least, you get such a thrill out of overcoming obstacles that you set yourself up for failure," the voice continued. "And then come out smelling like a rose anyway."_

_John snorted. "Somehow I don't think my commanding officers would call me a rose."_

_"Maybe a thorny one," the voice said. "Thorny and dead."_

_"If only."_

_"You don't seriously think they want you to fail, do you?"_

_John sighed, and kept walking. "I think they don't really give a shit what happens to me as long as I do my job."_

\\\\\

Once McKay felt safe walking around outside again, he was gone an awful lot of the time—entire mornings or afternoons, leaving with a bag over his shoulder and a promise to be back at some reasonable hour. Whenever John asked him where he'd been and what he'd been up to, he muttered something about perimeters or observing the Lion Guards; then he'd change the subject. A favorite diversion was how they could possibly cook the suicide birds, "and I'd like to point out that clearly we're acting as an agent of natural selection to increase the average intelligence of this species, because we've been parked here for well over a week and yet somehow they're stupid enough to keep crashing into us." Other times it was to harass John about attempting to move. Once, it was to declare Mandatory Bath Day.

"Because we stink," he said, when John raised an eyebrow at him. "You stink. I stink. The ship stinks. We're not getting out of here any time soon, so there's no reason to continue dwelling in squalor. Also, you look like the Unabomber."

"You're not looking particularly GQ yourself right now," John pointed out. He knew his beard ran wild if he didn't shave regularly, but at least it didn't look half-bad once it had more than a few days of growth. McKay's beard, on the other hand, was thin and patchy and a shade lighter that the rest of his hair, with a funny bald spot under his chin. If anyone looked like they ought to be handing out literature about liberal conspiracies, it was him.

"Exactly," McKay declared without argument. "So, time-out for personal hygiene. It's not like we don't have time to spare."

John watched from his pallet while McKay heated water on the little hot plate and went through the supply crates for soap. "Not to nag, but don't you have something more important to do? Like fix the spaceship?"

"I'm working on it," McKay said. "But, one, given the magnitude of the damage it's not like I'm going to be finished any time soon, and two, even if I fix the damn thing tomorrow I can't fly it in a straight line, so we'd still be grounded until Kharoush woke up. Unless you just happen to be a pilot?"

"Actually, I am," John said.

The soap squirted out of McKay's hand and plopped into the bucket. "Seriously?" he blurted, eyes goin wide. "And you forgot to mention this how?"

"Probably the same way you forgot to mention you're from Earth," John said.

"Oh. Are we still fighting about that?" McKay splashed some water onto his face and started soaping up his cheeks and chin.

"We were never fighting about it," John said. "I just kind thought you'd have mentioned it from the get-go. Is that how you recognized the P-90s?"

"I recognized bullets," McKay said. "That pretty much narrows down the options right there."

John watched him unfold a small knife and start shaving very, very carefully. "So I'm guessing you weren't Air Force," he said. "Before...you know."

"Before I agreed to let an alien symbiote take up residence in my nervous system?" McKay asked. "No. I was a contractor at Area 51, trying to reverse-engineer alien technology, until an unfortunate misunderstanding got me sent on a 'special consulting assignment' in the ass-end of the Russian Federation."

"So what happened?" John asked.

McKay delicately brought the knife down one side of his jaw. "Somebody touched something I told them specifically not to touch and it threw me through a wall."

John couldn't help but flinch a little on the _through._ "So, what? Tanys saved your life?"

"Oh, no, I was alive," McKay said with a small snort. "I was quadriplegic, though. Full-on Christopher Reeve sort of thing. I got airlifted halfway around the planet, and I was examined by some very stupid people with very advanced degrees who uniformly agreed that I would never be able to turn my head without assistance ever again. Somebody explained very nicely that the SGC would pay for all my extensive new medical needs for as long as I managed not to kill myself out of boredom, and I asked them to send me through the gate to the first Tok'ra base they could dial. It's part of the Carter Accords, see, that the SGC—"

"—offers injured personnel a chance to become hosts," John said. "I got that speech. Didn't think many people actually took the offer, though."

"Of course not," McKay said. "Most people can't get over the 'ick' reaction long enough to consider the benefits. But given the choice between Tanys or a life spent in a wheelchair, drinking through a tube and watching people like Malcolm Tunney and Peter Kavenaugh insult physics, while I couldn't even raise a hand to send them a particularly savage e-mail...well, what kind of a choice is that?"

John could see where McKay was coming from there, actually, after a week spent unable to stand. If he thought about only that side of things, and not the part where his body had suddenly become a timeshare... "Has it been worth it?" he asked.

McKay glared at him over a mustache of soap suds. "What do you think?" he asked. "I finally found a sentient being in this galaxy who's as smart as me and I get to work with some of the most advanced technology in existence. Not to mention that thanks to Tanys, I no longer have to worry about my bad back, bad cholesterol or extensive list of potentially fatal allergies."

"And you're part of a guerilla war against evil gods," John added.

McKay hissed as the knife slipped, leaving a thin red line on his upper lip. "Nobody's perfect," he said. "Now shut up before I mutilate myself, okay?"

He insisted on going behind the other brown curtain—the one John figured hid the toilet—to actually wash up, and came out with a clean shirt on; he used the same bucket in a half-hearted attempt to wash his old clothes, then tossed the water outside. John was gifted with a fresh bucket. "Now, be very careful—" McKay started to say.

"—because if I nick myself I'll die horribly," John finished. "Understood you the first time."

"And the soap is going to sting like hell on these wounds," McKay said. "Do you need a hand?"

John glared at him.

"Just asking," he said quickly, and went over to spread his wet clothes out over some boxes to dry.

John shaved with his ka-bar, something he'd gotten a knack for over the years, and he had to admit it felt good to lose the beard. The soap had a funny smell to it, just strong enough to remind him that it was alien, made on another world by creatures who just happened to have the same hygiene needs as him. McKay wasn't kidding about the stinging, either, but he at least managed to get the smell of old sweat and cordite off himself. He shucked his ruined pants and stuffed them into the bucket when he was done, pulling the blanket up over his bare legs as best he could. "What about the rest of my clothes?" he called out.

"The shirt you were wearing was a lost cause," McKay said. "Want me to look in your backpack?"

John actually had to bite his tongue to avoid yelling. "You brought my whole pack with you?" he asked, and didn't even add _god damn it._

McKay looked up from where he was arranging laundry. "Well, about half the things inside had fallen out, but yes, I found your pack downstream of where I found you. "

"You're just the gift that keeps on giving, McKay," John growled. "Give it here."

The pack must've been soaked, because it smelled like mildew inside, but John found his jacket and a change of clothes—which went into the laundry bucket—his canteen, an LED flashlight that still miraculously kind of worked, and an MRE that McKay snatched out of his hands. "Is there coffee in here?" he asked. "Dear god, please tell me it comes with coffee."

"They pretty much all come with coffee these days," John said. "Don't the Tok'ra have—"

"No," McKay said, ripping into the package feverishly. "One of the most advanced cultures in the galaxy and they don't have anything even resembling coffee. Or refined sugar. Or peanuts." He dumped the contents of the bag out on the ground and scattered them heedlessly until he found the little packet of instant coffee; he ripped it open, stuck his finger inside and then licked the dry grains that had stuck to it. "Mmm. Oh, my god. And it's not even real coffee."

John blinked a little at the whole display, still up to his elbows in the wash bucket. "How long since you've last been to Earth, buddy?" he asked warily.

"Three years," McKay said dreamily. He went back to the hot plate and started boiling a cup of water for the remaining instant coffee. "Also, I totally call dibs on that brownie."

John started half-heartedly sloshing his clothes around in the bucket, pausing periodically to rest his arms and shoulders. "Don't you ever, I dunno, visit?" he asked.

McKay suddenly went stiff, with his nose still in the coffee cup. "The life of a galactic terrorist doesn't leave a lot of room for vacations," he said. "Besides, I don't have...there's nobody for me to visit. Except maybe my cat. So I don't."

John nodded, mostly to himself. It made a little more sense how McKay could just up and join an alien insurgency, if he really had nothing left to lose. Hadn't he said something about a niece at one point, though? Probably he had a family in the same sense John did, the people who, when you had to go to them, they had to take you in. Or at least, who kept you out of prison to avoid a publicity scandal. It was kind of the same thing.

He scrubbed his clothes between his knuckles, paying special mind to cuffs and armpits, just like when he'd done his laundry in the tub in college; McKay grabbed that cord that looked like nylon and managed an improvised clothesline, securing the other end near the blocked-off pair of doors. "What's through there?" John asked, watching him fumble with the knots.

"Control room," McKay said. "You know, the cockpit, bridge, whatever. It's...it was...I need to focus on re-establishing system integrity from back here before I worry about the primary controls."

"But I can't fly this thing from back here," John said.

"You are not flying anything from anywhere," McKay declared "We have to wait for Kharoush to wake up."

"And we don't have a clue when that's going to be," John pointed out.

He rolled his eyes. "And so just because you're a pilot, you think you can fly anything you see?"

"Well, not to brag, but I've qualified on pretty much anything with a rotor and most things with wings," John said.

"And this is a Goa'uld cargo ship, which doesn't have either," McKay snapped. "Besides, it's not like we're anywhere near having this thing flyable, so, you know, moot discussion for now." He was nibbling his brownie now, in tiny bites, picking it apart with those nervous hands of his.

John pulled the blanket higher, and shrugged the Tok'ra jacket that usually served as his pillow over his shoulders; even with the sun out, it was chilly inside the ship. He found the wheat snack bread from the MRE and started munching on it, because after so many days of mush or the occasional chargrilled bird bits, anything else at all seemed appealing. "So how long until we get this thing flyable?" he asked. "Just out of curiosity."

"No idea," McKay said. He licked the last crumbs of chocolate off his fingers, then looked at the empty wrapper a little sadly. He sighed. "Okay. I'll be back in a minute, I've just got to, uh, to--"

"Check the perimeter?" John asked.

"Yeah. That." McKay hunted for and found his shoulder bag. "I'll be back before dark."

"Sure you will," John said, but McKay didn't look back at him, so he didn't notice that John had rolled his eyes.


	5. Chapter 5

_"I think I'm officially concerned for you."_

_"You can shut up any time," John announced, feeling for the next toe hold._

_"No, really--" There was a roar as the waves hit the cliffs, sending spray up onto the precariously narrow ledge John was trying to traverse. His companion sputtered slightly. "This transcends masochism. This is self-flagellation."_

_John inched along the slick ledge, using his hands and feet more than the dim copper moonlight. "Maybe I'm just trying to get rid of you," he suggested._

_"I doubt that." Another wave, another pause. "Because any normal person would've stopped by now, and then you and I could have a nice talk. If you wanted to get away from me, you would've given yourself an open road. Instead, you're trying to stop yourself."_

_"If I was trying to stop myself, I wouldn't have given me this ledge," John pointed out._

_He inched along in silence, except for the pounding of the waves below him, the spray that never seemed to make him wet. He could hear his follower alongside him, making the same awkward trek, but he didn't look back where he'd came. The important parts were always what lay ahead._

_Eventually, the other man spoke. "Perhaps you aren't running from me, but I think you are running."_

_"Running from what?" John asked._

_"Yourself."_

_He carefully stepped down from the ledge, over another tumble of slippery boulders and back to the clicking rocks of the sea. "I gotta say, you do get points for melodrama," he called._

_"If I'm being melodramatic, then turn around and tell me to my face that you're happy where you are."_

_"Of course I'm not happy," John said. "I'm on a goddamn beach to nowhere."_

_"That's not what I meant."_

_He sighed and kept walking. "Yeah, okay, so I'm thrilled to be stranded on a hostile planet with a neurotic, self-absorbed geek who keeps hiding things from me."_

_Behind him, the footsteps were drawing closer. "I didn't mean that, either."_

\\\\\

If there was one upside to McKay's disappearing acts—and John had to look hard for one, as the ship lay broken and he lay bored and paranoid and helpless—the one upside was that what McKay didn't know, he couldn't complain about. So while he was gone, John started doing cautious calisthenics, gentle stretching and half-assed yoga moves he picked up during previous bouts of physical therapy, that sort of thing: trying to get some of the strength back in his limbs and prevent the healing muscles from freezing up on him. His first few attempted push-ups left him curled up and trembling on the floor almost immediately, and he was reluctant to put the leg to the test even when it was starting to look less chewed-up, but he knew all too well that his career was on the line here. The SGC might've valued his magic genes, but they had no place for a disabled officer, and if he didn't make a clean recovery he might never fly anything bigger than a crop duster again.

It had been a year and a half since John had flown anything at all.

Since life support was disabled and the ship didn't exactly come with exterior ventillation ("God, I hope not," were McKay's exact words, "because I definitely don't have the means to repair a hull fracture out here, and that's the only kind of ventillation we could conceivably get--") they had to leave the door open much of the time; the curtain kept out insects, rain, and the suicide birds, who were finally starting to drop in number. About half the time John could hear McKay coming about a mile away, which said worrisome things about the man's stealth skills, though since he'd evaded Jaffa more than once it was entirely possible that he could be quiet when he cared to make the effort.

The import thing was, John could hear him coming and get back to bed, blanket in his lap, looking perfectly well-behaved, if a bit flushed, for McKay's suspicious eyes. "Hi, honey, how was your day?" he asked cheerily.

"Pointless," McKay declared. "Much like your witty banter."

"Ouch, McKay, that hurts," John said.

"Please, you had all afternoon to think of something and that was the best you can come up with?" McKay put his bag down and stood near the hot plate, just standing for a moment. "Incidentally, it's getting really cold outside."

"All that rain must've been from a front," John said. "Any idea what season this hemisphere's in?"

"Autumn, I suspect." He stretched his back, which made some alarming creaking sounds John could hear from his pallet. "And given the latitude and the geography, we really don't want to see what winter looks like up here. Until I can restart the engines, this place has no heat."

"Maybe you should work on that," John said. "Seeing as I'm a disabled toddler and all."

McKay didn't snap to that, though; he rubbed his eyes wearily and said, "Trust me, Major, in the event I discover any problem on this ship that's simple enough for one such as yourself to address, I will pass it off to you with alacrity." But his usual bite seemed oddly blunted, and he spent a long time sitting on his pallet that night, staring off into space, half-eaten pouch of mush held loosely in both hands.

If John were a better person, he might've tried talking to him or something. If McKay were a better person, he might've even talked back. As it was, when John got bored, he asked questions like, "So which Star Wars prequels did you see?" or "How about the Patriots?" just to sound out responses. (Which were, respectively, "One too many" and "Do I look like I care?") Occasionally McKay even asked him a question back, like "Did they ever make that new Dr. Who they were talking about?" or "Who's president now, anyway? Hayes? Tell me it's not Hayes." Sometimes these even produced conversations, diversions that didn't really tell him anything at all. Most of the time they petered off into awkward silences, punctuated by McKay's cursing and John's attempts to stretch.

So when McKay left on one his mysterious perimeter checks one day, John waited until he was out of earshot and then eyed the curtain with the toilet behind it. Today, he had decided, was Pee Day.

He pushed himself upright on his good leg, which was shaky but held; this time he slowly put weight on the other leg, with one arm on a stack of crates, in case it gave out on him. It didn't. It hurt like hell, but he could limp on it. Progress. With arms flung out, John started making his way to the toilet, eying the debris field from his new, upright perspective as he went. The "sample" crates were all festooned with elaborate patterns of disassembled machinery and spare parts, which he tried very hard not to disturb; if there was any method to the madness, though, he still couldn't see it. (Sometimes he wondered if McKay could see it, either.)

He arrived at the toilet and leaned against a section of undamaged bulkhead to take his weight off the bad leg and rest his stiff, achy abs. Stage one accomplished, and he was slightly winded, but hey, he'd been flat on his back for over two weeks; he had an excuse. "Stage two," he murmured under his breath, and pulled back the curtain.

The toilet turned out to be a squat, bronze-colored urn, and there was nothing inside it despite the fact John never saw McKay empty the thing. As an experiment, just so there were no surprises, he spit into it. There was a spark like static and the glob of spit was vaporized before it hit the mirror-like finish. "Coulda used one of these in a few cockpits I've been in," he said out loud to no one in particular, and leaned again on the nearest stable length of bulkhead with one hand.

Stage Two accomplished, and he didn't even have to flush. Now for the all-important Stage Three, getting back to the pallet so he could catch his breath. Operation Pee Day was looking like a potential success, and definitely something he could gloat about the next time Rodney started arguing that he was a fragile snowflake.

Until an alarm went off.

John started for a minute, but there was no helpful flashing light to pinpoint the source; it was a high, grating whine of a siren, and he wasn't sure how far away it would be audible thanks to the wide-open door. He made himself listen carefully, and figured out it was coming from a stretch of open bulkhead that McKay had been working on earlier that morning—well, for certain values of work. He'd sworn a lot, complained at length to John and then left on his wanderings, and John wasn't at all sure what he'd been doing or why. Just that the sound of the alarm might give away their position more effectively than any energy signature McKay could babble on about, if there were any Jaffa patrols in the valley.

He pushed off from the wall and started limping towards the doors, with as much speed as he dared. Which turned out to be too much, when the damaged leg suddenly cramped on him. John swore and caught himself just in time to avoid crashing into one of McKay's delicate arrangements of doo-dads, and when the cramp didn't abate he lowered himself to the floor and tried to massage the muscle without touching the burned and blistered skin above it. Unsurprisingly, it didn't really help.

The alarm wailed in his ears. From where he was sitting, he could now see a series of multicolored crystals spread out on the floor, connected by wires; one of the crystals was blinking furiously, and John guessed that was the source of the whining noise. It would be an easy matter to just unplug the damn thing, except of course he had no idea if that would stop the alarm or destroy the ship or upset the order of the known universe. But he couldn't walk any further, and the thought of crawling all the way to the door made his whole left side twitch in trepidation.

Surely it couldn't hurt to just have a look at the crystals, right?

It wasn't actually possible to crawl using only his left leg and right arm, but John did make a valiant effort, and he got where he was headed in the end. The interlinked crystals had been removed from an armature, but the wires kept them attached to it; they were laid out in no particular sequence he could identify, but when he studied the rack he found empty slots that matched the size and shape of each rod in roughly the order they were arranged. A small screen below the rack was spitting out warnings in Goa'uld, which was no help whatsoever. He didn't even know whether he was looking at sensors or communication or what. For all he knew, it was in-flight entertainment.

Still, okay, problem. What was the problem? The alarm, obviously; the alarm and the blinking crystal. So why would it be blinking? He touched them all, but none of them felt hot. He studied the rack some more. If the crystals plugged into it in the order that he was guessing, then it looked like they'd be connected in a certain way...but the wires didn't follow that pattern exactly. Had McKay tried to short-circuit something? Reroute around a damaged subsystem? But what exactly was the problem?

The blinking crystal was blue. It was wired on both ends to an orange crystal on the right and on one end to a yellow crystal on the left. On a whim, John disconnected one of the wires to the orange crystal.

The alarm stopped.

In the sudden silence, he heard only his own heavy breathing and the sound of McKay's lumbering footsteps running across the rocky ground outside. He burst through the doorway, tangling briefly in the curtain, before stopping short as he took in the full tableau: John panting on the floor, across the room from his pallet, caught with the loose wire still in his hand. "What the hell are you doing?" McKay blurted.

"No idea," John said. "Are we gonna explode or something?"

McKay unfroze himself and crashed down at John's side, batting his hands away from the wires. "Let me see, let me...oh...oh, hell, of course...wait...wait, what did you just do?"

"I just said, I don't--"

"No no no," McKay said, "I mean, how did you know what wire to disconnect?" He was staring at John with a strange expression, brows pulled close but eyes wide. For once, he sounded genuinely surprised, not patronizing.

John shrugged. "Lucky guess?"

"Like hell it was," McKay said. "I can't believe I didn't notice before I left—that feedback loop could've blown up the crystal."

"Which would've done what?" John asked.

McKay shrugged. "Taken off your hand, if you'd been holding it. Completely disabled navigation sensors. Shit." He rubbed his eyes. "Seriously, how did you know what to do?"

"Just...logic," he said. "You can tell which slots the rods go into, you know?"

McKay stared at him very seriously for a moment, before he said, "Are you absolutely sure Kharoush isn't awake in there?"

_"Yes,"_ John said. His stomach turned over at the very thought. "Like you said, I'd be the first to know, right?"

"It's just that you're not supposed to be able to do these things," McKay said. "And by 'these things' I mean 'advanced alien technology that could severely explode if mishandled.' So even if Kharoush isn't conscious, it might be a sign that he's started to recover, and maybe there's a certain amount of subconscious information bleed..."

"Or I might just be lucky," John said. "Or smart."

McKay snorted, still looking at the disconnected wire. "No offense, but if I didn't notice the feedback loop, I highly doubt you could've figured it out with your native wit."

"Seriously, it's a logic puzzle," John said. "Compare the rack to the pattern of wires. Some of these things are not like the others. Most likely they have to do with the thing that's blinking ominously. I had a one in three chance of picking the right wire to disconnect after that."

"Huh," McKay said. "So you're hot _and_ smart."

John almost laughed out loud at that, but in deference to his abs he managed to limit himself to a restrained, "Gee, thanks, McKay. Do you say that to all the guys?"

McKay's face turned scarlet, and he blinked furiously. John noticed, suddenly, that there was a large streak of muddy earth on his face that continued halfway down his chest, and his hands were covered in cuts and scrapes. One fingernail was torn down to the quick. "I, uh," he stammered. "I didn't mean to imply—that is, I don't—I mean, compared to—not that I'm comparing you to him, I just, I mean I am comparing you, in the sense that he was also Kharoush's host, and the fact that I recognize that in comparison to him you're more, uh, more intellectually astute as well as more, more aesthetically interesting—"

"McKay?" John said, before it got any worse. "Stop talking."

"Okay," he said. "I can do that." He looked helplessly back at the wires in his hands, though John would've only given even odds that he was actually thinking about the machinery. Then again, John wasn't going to be thinking of anything but his injuries for the foreseeable future, and certainly not about whether this was actually an attempt to hit on him, because...well, _shit._

He stretched his leg a few times; the cramp had passed, but he wasn't going to strain it any more today than he had do. Operation Pee Day aborted. He rolled onto hands and knees, but his abs and left side twinged again. Damn it, damn it, damn it. "I'm gonna need a hand here," he said quietly.

"What? Oh, right." McKay blinked, and John could practically see the gears shift in his head again. "What the hell are you doing over here, anyway? Are you trying to do yourself permanent damage?"

"I was trying to shut down the goddamn alarm before the Jaffa came up here," John said. "What happened to you, anyway?"

"I, uh, fell." McKay stood up, and with his help John managed to get up on his good leg again. "Anyway, it's not important. You really need to be more careful, though of course I don't expect you to listen this time any more than you have the other ninety-nine times I've reminded you."

"Maybe if you'd been here to fix it yourself, I could've stayed in bed." John wrapped his arm around McKay's wide shoulders and accepted the help crossing the room to his pallet, trying not to get too much body contact if he could help it. Just on principle, of course.

"Yes, well, I'm here now, is what counts," McKay said as he helped John slide to the floor. "Just give me a minute to wash up and I'll get back to work."

There was a certain flatness to his nagging, and John looked up at him carefully. Under the dirt, McKay's eyes were looking bloodshot. "When was the last time you got any sleep?" John asked him.

McKay just waved at him, a vague flap of the hand, like he was batting the question out of the air. "I can go for days without sleep, thanks to Tanys. Don't worry about me."

_Kind of hard not to,_ John thought, but voicing it would've made things even more awkward, so he didn't say a word.

\\\\\

_"I know who you are," John said, looking at the fat crescent moon that glazed the slow waves with coppery and gold highlights._

_The footsteps behind him also paused. "Really?"_

_"I don't appreciate being snuck up on, either," he added._

_"I see very little connection between chasing you across your dreamscape and sneaking, in any definition of the word."_

_"So you admit you're chasing me?"_

_"I'm just trying to get to know you."_

_John turned to the source of the voice. A tall, bulky man with dark skin and almond-shaped eyes stood beside him, in clothes of cream and tan and khaki. "Hi. I'm John Sheppard. I like football, ferris wheels and anything that goes faster than two hundred miles an hour. There, you know me."_

_"If only." The man looked out over the waters as well, as if searching for whatever John was looking at. "My name is Kharoush, and I like alliterative poetry, things that fly, and the color green. Do you think that means you know me?"_

_"No offense, but I don't particularly want to get to know you," John said._

_"But I'd like to know you," Kharoush said. "You saved my life, after all, and you're doing a fairly good job taking care of Rodney and Tanys."_

_"You saved me, too, but that doesn't mean we owe each other anything," John said. "This is a temporary arrangement."_

_Kharoush shrugged. "Is there any other kind?"_

\\\\\

After that, John was granted limited walking-around privileges, which mainly meant trips to the toilet and back, as his leg got stronger. McKay didn't stop disappearing, which meant John could also continue his exercise plan uninterrupted, pushing through pain and weakness. McKay didn't stop disappearing, and John noticed that the scrapes on his knuckles didn't heal.

He didn't say anything about Kharoush to McKay, not yet. John was pretty sure he'd be tickled pink to hear that his friend was alive and well, even if he wasn't communicating consciously yet; and that was the rub, the one fact (or excuse) that kept John from bringing it up. The dreams of the beach were just dreams; it was entirely possible that his mind was playing tricks on him, after too many days cooped up with McKay in the confined space of the ship. When he was awake, his mind was still his own—or, at least, he thought it was. It had been days since he'd taken any painkillers and he didn't feel any different. _Subconscious information bleed,_ though...when Kharoush woke up, would John really be the first to know? Or was a part of him already slipping away?

"What's in it for you?" he asked Tanys at one point, while McKay was "resting" again. Tanys was working on the navigation computer again, and had deigned to let John hold the toolbox, something that gave him an excuse to move from the pallet to the other side of the room.

"I am not sure what you mean," Tanys said, prodding another rack of crystals with some tools.

"I'm just trying to understand the Tok'ra...thing," John admitted. "I mean, I get why a guy like McKay would sign up. But what do you get out of sharing with him?"

"Companionship. Peace of mind. Freedom from the constant struggle to control an unwilling host."

"That's it?"

"You're framing it in the wrong terms," Tanys said. "You might as well ask what a human gets out of consensual sexual congress when he's just as capable of rape."

"You really see it like that?"

"We really do." He said something in Goa'uld that was most likely an obscenity and removed a crystal from the rack.

John took it from him and let it drop on a pile of other duds. "But you're not sorry you stuck me with Kharoush without asking permission."

"It's an imperfect analogy," Tanys said. "I'm not sorry to have saved Kharoush's life, nor yours. In fact, I grow less sorry the more I get to know you."

John blinked. "Really?"

"Mmm-hhm. The wire cutter, please."

That was a tool that looked more like a melon baller, but John wasn't interested in a lesson on Goa'uld electrical engineering; he passed it over. "Kinda thought I was pissing you guys off, to tell the truth."

"Oh, Rodney finds you utterly infuriating," Tanys said with a small smile. "I find it quite entertaining to observe."

John did not know what to say to that for a few minutes, and ultimately decided to dodge the whole issue, because _infuriating_ and _entertaining_ and _aesthetically interesting_ did not add up to anything he wanted to touch at the moment. "And you don't mind observing?"

Tanys didn't answer for a while, though John couldn't tell if he was avoiding the question or just concentrating on something else. "I have had many hosts in my life," he finally said. "Each one was a unique personality. Each blending has been different. Some of my hosts preferred to be in control, and I trust them to step back when it is appropriate or necessary. Some of them, I admit, were better suited than me to the tasks we undertook, and it was practical to let them lead. Other times the opposite has been true."

"So that's not exactly an answer," John said, toying with one of the dud crystals.

"No, it is not," Tanys said. "I'm sorry I could not be more helpful, but generalization is nearly impossible. The blending of host and symbiote is...difficult to describe, even amongst ourselves. Perhaps when Kharoush awakes, you'll experience it for yourself."

Which was kind of what John was afraid of. But even then, he didn't say anything; just sat up passing Tanys tools until he couldn't keep his eyes open anymore.

\\\\\

_He walked along the beach, now, and perhaps it did say something about his subconscious that this stretch was wide and level, the stones small, the tides calm. This time his companion was a pale old man, small and wiry, with an Einstein shock of white hair. John somehow knew it was still Kharoush. "I hope you're not scared of me," he was saying. "I don't mean you any harm."_

_"No offense, but I think we got different definitions of 'harm,'" John said._

_Kharoush sighed. "None taken. Believe me, the Tok'ra figured out long ago that most humans are...unsuited to be hosts. They will always be disgusted and horrified by what we are, what we do. They will never be able to offer us their trust."_

_"It's not so much that I don't trust you," John said, "just that..."_

_"...you don't trust us," Kharoush completed when John couldn't. "You trust Rodney with your health, Tanys with your safety, you trust our spies and agents on a professional level, but you don't trust me with you."_

_"I'm not generally a very trusting person," John muttered._

_Kharoush cackled. "So I've noticed."_

_"What's that supposed to mean?"_

_Kharoush didn't answer; he look out over the water a while, as if gauging the height of the moon. "It comes down to me, you know," he said. "I was fully conscious when I left Nurlan. I agreed to this. You can resent them for coming up with the idea, but it's my responsibility."_

_"And are you sorry?" John asked._

_Kharoush looked at him with eyes so pale they were nearly colorless."That I'm alive? Oh, no. That I've met you? Hardly. That it's left us in this awkward situation? Yes. I'm sorry that I wasn't able to give you the same choice I had."_


	6. Chapter 6

And then one day McKay didn't come back before dark.

He'd left near mid-day, near as John could tell by the angle of light through the doorway. P96-402 had a solar day about twenty-two hours long, just short enough to play hell with John's ability to establish a normal sleeping schedule, and he'd been able to tell that the nights were gently drawing in; McKay usually made it back about the time the doorway started to grow dim, the indirect sun fading into twilight. So John spent the afternoon trying to straighten up the "living" areas of the ship—mopping up around the water barrel with a towel, cleaning the hot plate, washing the blankets and shaking out the pallets in a bare corner. (It was good exercise, and it kept him busy, and McKay obviously wasn't going to do it.) He avoided touching anything that might disturb McKay's repairs, and he didn't go outside—he had no idea how far the cloak extended, and while McKay say he'd set the passive sensors to alert them of any Jaffa life signs coming up the valley, John wasn't sure how much warning they'd give him, and he sure as hell didn't want to be caught in some kind of run-down with a bum leg.

As the doorway grew dark, John fixed himself a packet of mush from their dwindling supply, and added the pepper from the long-gone MRE as an experiment. It didn't really help. He washed his face and shaved, and sat down to rest his leg for a little while. The doorway grew darker.

It occurred to him that they really needed to start carrying some kind of communicators.

He shut the doors so he could switch on the lantern crystal, but he didn't know how to bring up the sensor sweep manually. It wasn't like there weren't plenty of other things that might've happened to McKay besides more Lion Guards in the valley. Things like Lion Guards somewhere else. Broken legs. Falls off cliffs. A symbiote didn't make him indestructible, after all, as he took such pains to remind John. Besides, Tanys hadn't seemed to do much for a skinned knuckle in the past couple of days, never mind a broken bone or a severed artery. McKay was getting so run down that he'd left John alone with an impending explosion. For all John knew he could've walked into a tree and concussed himself.

He shut the lantern off, pushed aside the door curtain and opened the doors. The area around the ship was mostly a smooth scarp of different-sized rocks, dotted with crooked trees and patches of wildflowers—a good place to crash, if you had to, because it didn't leave much of a debris trail. The sky was barely blue off on the far horizon, and the stars were coming out in unfamiliar patterns; there were two small moons, too, one white and one the gray-green color he associated with the Statue of Liberty. He squinted through the gathering gloom, but there was no sign of McKay, just a damp and chilly breeze that cut through his t-shirt and drew up gooseflesh on his chest and arms.

_I'll be back by nightfall,_ was what McKay had said when he left. A lot of things could happen between noon and nightfall.

John closed the door and switched on the lantern again. He was, of course, being irrational, because McKay was a big boy and Tanys was like a million years old and they could totally take care of themselves. John could take care of himself, because he was mobile now, and had slightly more than a snowball's chance in hell of making it back to the stargate under his own power; even without a GDO or radio, there were planets he could dial, secondary evacuation sites and the like where he could get help and get back to Earth. It would just be a problem of getting past the eight million Jaffa guarding it, but John had always had a thing about suicide missions.

But then again, McKay had saved his life—saved it in the most fucked-up way imaginable, true, but saved it. John also had this thing about returning favors.

He found his jacket, and his rifle, though true to McKay's evaluation it was half-empty with nothing to reload; the pistol was totally empty, and his belt had apparently gotten wet, so he had to assume for now that his spare clips were useless. He took the rifle and the flashlight, and shut off the lantern again, plunging the ship into total darkness. This was absolutely a bad idea, the infirm riding to the rescue of the insane. This was the kind of thinking that had gotten him stuck under Cheyenne Mountain instead of in the air.

He stepped out into the stony meadow and immediately checked over his shoulder for the invisible space ship. If he reached out for it, he could just see where the cloak distorted under his hands; there were also a couple of suicide birds laying on the ground, but that was about it. He'd just have to try to remember where they were parked. A little below the ship, right at the tree line, he found a jumble of broken branches—probably from trees they'd clipped coming in. With a little bit of snapping, one of them made a halfway-decent walking stick, which at least helped support his bad leg a little as he started his descent.

McKay could obviously be stealthy when he chose, and there was the small problem that John didn't know where the hell he went on these little field trips. "Perimeter check" was his usual excuse, but how far of a perimeter could he have actually set? If he was spying on the Lion Guard camp, he'd have gone down the valley, but if he was looking for another route to the stargate despite his bullheaded insistence that there wasn't one...and there was always the possibility that he had some other objective entirely, one John couldn't even guess at. _Sample-gathering,_ whatever that meant. "If I were a space terrorist in the body of a whiny geek, where would I go?" he muttered. He more or less remembered the route McKay taken to and from the ship when he'd tricked the Jaffa, and for lack of anything better, he decided to start there.

The little moons didn't provide much light even though one was full and one nearly-so, and once John got under the pines there wasn't much hope of finding McKay's backtrail. He concentrated instead on not leaving one of his own, sticking to the stony ridges and the small streams that fed into the deeper river on the valley floor. Already he was understanding exactly how stupid this idea was, and wondered just how much McKay would flip out if he got back to the ship by another route and John wasn't there. It would serve him right for his disappearing acts, though. He wasn't the only one who could wander away at all hours--

A sharp crack up ahead made John freeze, even before he realized what was unnatural about it. The forest was completely still, without so much as a night bird stirring. A few moments later, there was another crack, and the sound of scuffling in low brush. John angled towards the sound, but froze again when he saw a faint light up ahead. Did McKay carry a flashlight in that little bag of his? Was he careless enough to use it where the Lion Guard camp might see?

A voice called out across the forest, a voice definitely not McKay's. In the shifting lights, John suddenly caught a glimpse of gold and silver armor. Shit.

He started doubling back immediately, but he knew that if he followed his own footsteps, at his current speed, they'd overtake him. The other option was to make his way up the river banks, except the river was already a gully here, with the edges overgrown by brambled and willows; he'd probably break his other leg trying to climb down there in the dark. If he was really, really lucky, though, it might provide some decent cover...and at the moment his luck seemed to be running about fifty-fifty anyway. He took off towards the river, carelessly cutting through the soft beds of pine needles that left an obvious trail.

He broke through the low-hanging pine boughs just in time to see a pair of lion-helmeted Jaffa on the opposite banks. He bit down on a curse and tried to jump backwards, but ended up tripping over his own walking stick and going down hard—on his left side, of course. He gave in to the pain for just a moment, and was rewarded with a spotlight going on over his head. _Shit._

John struggled to his feet, stick forgotten, and managed to break into a limping jog. He could hear the Lion Guards _kree_-ing at each other now, but hopefully they wouldn't get close enough to take aim at him--

A branch exploded over his head, raining down smoldering splinters. Or they could just take random potshots. That worked, too.

He pressed himself flat behind a rare broadleaf tree, wasting precious seconds to catch his breath. Was there some place to hide instead? He doubted it would be as easy as just climbing one of these trees, but if he could just get out of sight for a few minutes, some of the pine boughs spread all the way to the ground, and in his black uniform he could roll underneath...but another staff blast set a cloud of needles exploding off another pine, and he knew he wasn't going to get out of anyone's line of sight, not without a miracle. Already his legs were shaking, his bad leg aching, his abdominal muscles burning in protest, and he took the safety off his P-90 knowing he'd have to make every shot count for this to be even a half-way viable plan. He spun out from the cover of the tree--

\--just in time to hear the _beep-beep-whoosh_ of a zat gun in the shadows. A moment later, McKay came racing up to him, eyes flashing eerily in the darkness. "Come on!" he shouted. "There's more of them behind me!"

"No argument here!" John said, and let his rifle drop. McKay had blood on his face, now, but he didn't seem to have any trouble moving, which put him one up on John. "Don't wait for me!"

"Oh, no you don't," McKay said, slowing down. "Don't tell me you--"

A flurry of staff blasts went over their heads, and the tree they were under cracked like thunder. John had a moment to look up and make out a dead limb, one at least as long as a car, splintering off close to the trunk. It plummeted down at him, and stupidly he reached up, like he really thought he was going to catch it, like he wasn't about to get at least another head injury out of this, probably worse.

He heard McKay's unintelligable yell.

He heard the sound of another wild staff blast.

And then the limb was upon him, and something happened. John was very aware of all the dead wood in his hands, the weight of it, the dry old bark biting into his palms. He had to lock his good knee and strain against it. But he also felt something coursing through his arms and shoulders, a lightening thrill, almost like another pair of ghostly hands closing over his own and making him strong.

The far end of the limb hit the ground, but for just a moment, John caught the other end, and held it easily over his head before shifting it to the ground.

McKay fired his zat a few more times and yelled "Come on!" and whatever little miracle had just occurred was abruptly over. John felt every injury on his body in that moment, and he thought he felt something in his abdomen give way. He staggered and almost fell, would've fallen if not for McKay catching his arm and hauling him forward like he weighed about as much as a bag of groceries. "Come on, come on," McKay said anxiously. "There's more where that came from and they'll start to wake up soon and I need to get back into a soundproofed room so I can yell at you."

"Same here," John gasped. He reached under his jacket with the hand that wasn't clinging to McKay's shoulder, and felt blood seeping through his t-shirt. Dammit, dammit, dammit. There was no way he'd be able to make it back to the ship. He was going to get them both killed.

Except he didn't; McKay took them up a ridge and under an overhang, halfway carrying John up some of the steeper inclines, and by some insane stroke of luck there was no pursuit. He soon gave up listening for any, because it took all his concentration to stay upright and in motion, putting one foot in front of the other, keeping his arm clamped around Rodney's neck and not stepping on his feet on the rough terrain. McKay, for his part, fell eerily silent; or maybe it was Tanys in the lead now, and John hadn't noticed, because he couldn't imagine McKay easily keeping his tongue under control no matter who was chasing him. He supposed it didn't really matter either way.

They made it to the krummholz unmolested, McKay sure-footed even in the dark. The moons had moved since John set out and the stars had wheeled considerably; there seemed to be a lot fewer of them than on Earth, especially without the light pollution of a populated planet. John would've walked right into the side of the ship like one of the birds if McKay hadn't stopped him and pointed him at the invisible door. He kept his hands on John all the way to the pallets, carrying most of his weight.

As soon as the door was closed and John was deposited safely in bed, McKay said with the full force of his indignation, "Just what the _hell_ did you think you were doing?"

"Not sure," John said. "For some reason I thought you were worth saving."

"Oh, for Christ's sake--" McKay snatched up the healing device and fitted it over his hand. "I was perfectly safe up that tree before you started stirring them up. Another hour or two and I would've been back perfectly fine."

John couldn't concentrate enough to answer that immediately; he braced himself and peeled up his t-shirt. The shiny plastic-like dressing over his abdomen had torn partly away, taking a patch of flesh with it; through all the blood it was hard to see how deep the damage went. McKay went shockingly white under the blood and bruises on his own face, and waved his hands over the wound, biting his lip. After a few minutes of bubbly tinging, John didn't perceive any change in the pain, but McKay's shoulders slumped with a sigh. "No internal bleeding," he said. "Miraculous. If you didn't have the luck of a drunk, you would not survive by your wits alone."

"What about you?" John managed to ask. In the light of the lantern crystal, McKay looked bad; it looked like he'd been hit in the face in at least two places, leaving a blue-black bruise on his jaw and the long oozy cut on his forehead. His hands were still cut up and scraped raw. His clothes were filthy. "Where the hell were you tonight?"

"I have a mission from the Tok'ra Council," McKay said; he grabbed a small towel from the kitchen area and pressed it against John's stomach to staunch the bleeding. "I'm trying to complete it."

"Does it involve getting yourself killed?" John asked.

"Oh, you're one to talk," McKay snarled, and pressed down a little harder than strictly necessary. John couldn't stop himself flinching. "Sorry," McKay added, like a curse.

"You said you'd be back by dark," John said, aware that when he put it like this, he sounded like a whiny kid. "I thought you'd been caught."

"So you decided to go running around playing hide-and-go-seek with the Lion Guard?" McKay snapped. "Seriously, Sheppard, do you actually think before you do these things? Because I'm not seeing a lot of evidence of higher brain functions from you."

John's patience had reached a frayed end, between the pain and the fear and the insults. "If you call me an idiot one more time, McKay, I swear to God--"

"Oh, I haven't even _begun_ to call you names," McKay said furiously. "Because I understand that you military types have a thing about throwing yourself on grenades and all, but did it ever occur to you, even for a moment, that it's not just your own life you were risking here? Kharoush is comotose, he can't stop you, and if anything happens you, he's just as dead. You have a responsibility to--"

"A responsibility I didn't ask for!" John snapped.

"That doesn't matter!" McKay said. "You're stuck with him, and taking stupid risks with both your lives, and I can't keep being afraid for you!"

He was breathing almost as heavily as John now, and his hands were shaking a little where he had them clamped over the bloody towel. John looked into McKay's big, bloodshot eyes, and waited a few minutes to get his own temper under control before he said something stupid. "So I get that," John said. "Because you know what? I'm kind of sick of worrying about you, too."

McKay snorted. "I'm not the one who nearly died three weeks ago--"

"Your hands aren't healing," John said. "Did you notice that? And I don't have a clue when the last time you slept was, and you keep disappearing on me to God only knows where while I'm stuck here on my not-yet-dead ass waiting for you. Did it ever occur to you that if you get yourself killed or captured on one of your little field trips, I'm SOL here on my own?"

McKay blinked a few times, which told John all he needed to know right there. "Kharoush is going to wake up eventually," he protested weakly. "He'll know how to finish repairs."

"And when's that gonna be?" John asked. "Before or after the food runs out? Or winter sets in?"

Instead of answer, McKay peeled back the towel to check on John's wound, then made a face. "We're gonna have to clean that. Um, keep holding this down."

John pressed the bloody towel to his stomach while McKay collected some more clean clothes and warmed up a bowel of water. There were a dozen other things that he could've added, except he couldn't, not out loud. Things like _I don't know what's eating you_ or _I kinda like making you speechless_ or _I fucking hate sitting on my ass while you're doing all the work._ It was weird enough to have all the rest out there in the open. Like the dig about Kharoush—wasn't it enough knowing he had the damn thing inside him without worrying about his health and safety, too? Maybe this was how unwed mothers felt.

They washed the blood away very gingerly, while John thought longingly of the long-gone painkillers, and then McKay used some trick to safely peel away the old dressing and replace it with a fresh one. "How many of those we got left?" John asked, peeking at the fragile new skin over the wound.

"Not many," McKay said. "So stop taking dumb risks."

"Stop holding out on me," John said.

"I'm not hiding anything from you that you need to know," McKay said prissily.

John growled at him. "I'm a grown man and an Air Force officer, McKay. We're supposed to be allies. I've got your goddamned sidekick renting space in my head. I deserve to know what it is that's so important to you you're running off at all hours risking your ass for it. I want to know what's more important than getting us off this planet and what's worth leading the Jaffa straight back to us. I want some fucking _honesty_ here, or else I might just try my luck on my own as soon as this hole in my stomach heals up, and to hell with you and Kharoush and your goddamn mission."

It was bluff, and not even a good one, given that John was flat on his back, but McKay didn't call it; instead he sat back and rubbed his eyes. "Fine," he said. "Fine. You're right. I...you're right."

"You're damn right I am." John waited a few minutes, while McKay stared off into some point in the middle distance. He may, in fact, have fallen asleep with his eyes open. "So what's the mission?" he finally prompted him.

"Three months ago a Tok'ra archaeologist found a set of data crystals during a dig," McKay slowly. "They didn't match the technology of anything else in the site, so she passed them along to a friend, who passed them on to another friend, who...well, the point is, I eventually got hold of them when somebody realized they were Ancient."

_"The_ Ancients?" John asked. "Gate-builders and all?"

"The same," McKay said. "Ancient technology is kind of my area of specialization, and that makes me the only expert the Tok'ra have, since it's about the only thing in this galaxy that is outright before their time. I managed to rig together a way to read the crystals, and it turned out to be...well, basically, an address book. Lists of planets and descriptions of what was on them—at least, in the Ancient's heyday, so it's only, what, ten thousand years out of date?"

"And I presume P96-402 was one of the entries."

McKay nodded. "The Ancients called this place 'Taen-na-Kopromagus,' which is quite possibly the stupidest name ever, and they had a laboratory here once. Seriously advanced technology, the kind that...well...the kind of technology that could change everything for the Tok'ra." He cleared his throat. "But of course, after ten thousand years, who knew what was still here? The Goa'uld never had much to do with this planet—there's never been any resources worth extracting, no population worth enslaving, nothing worth investigating except some quirks in the magnetic field. This place hasn't been much use to anybody except maybe as a, a gas station on the way between places that are actually worth visiting. So the High Council wasn't sure whether it'd be worth sending people to look for a lab that might've been destroyed thousands of years ago."

"But they did," John said.

"They did," McKay sighed. "Just me, because I'm the expert on Ancient technology, and Kharoush to fly the ship and because they seem to think that I can't take care of myself. Except the Lion Guard sighted us almost as soon as we dropped out of hyperspace, and...the rest you know."

"You think the Lion Guard are here for the same reason you are?" John asked.

"It'd be one hell of a coincidence if they were, but then again, this has been the mission of absurd coincidences." McKay scrubbed his face. "I've been going out with a hand sensor and I've been able to detect stronger energy signatures, something that might be coming from the lab, if it's underground—which would explain how nobody's managed to notice it for ten thousand years. They're too diffuse to detect from space, but if one of Inanna's ships made a pit stop here and just happened to find the same energy signatures...I meant, the power source behind them must be insanely long-lasting to still be giving off anything detectable after so long. That alone is reason enough to start searching for it."

"And the last thing anybody needs is Goa'uld with better batteries," John said.

McKay nodded, and looked away, off into a shadowy corner of the room, unblinking. John had seen that kind of look on guys' faces before. "It's just stupid coincidence," he said. "That the Lion Guard shot us down. That your team blundered into them like you did. That so many people had to die for a...a _treasure hunt_ on this stupid little planet. But I can still fix this. I can bring Kharoush home alive and get you home safe and find the lab, I _can,_ I just need a little more time, see? Except the ship is broken and you're..._you,"_ he punctuated this a twiddling wave, "and Kharoush still won't wake up and the damned Jaffa are everywhere I turn around and that energy signature, it's like I'm right on top of it, which I probably am, except I can't localize it enough to find a damn door, and I do realize that we're running out of food and time and the Jaffa are going to follow me home sooner rather than later and the medical kit is basically gone and just, I just--"

"Hey," John said loudly, because Rodney's voice had been rising in both pitch and volume and he still hadn't blinked. "Hey, listen, I get wanting to finish the mission, all right? I get that. I've been there."

"You have?" Rodney asked dumbly.

John sighed. "I didn't come here alone either, remember?"

"Oh." Rodney rubbed his eyes with his scratched-up hands. "Sorry. I just...sorry."

John thought about sitting up, but thought better of it; instead he settled for an awkward pat on the only part of Rodney he could reach, which was a leg. "Listen. Uh. We're in this mess together, okay? I can help you. I mean, okay, not right now so much, but...just...you gotta tell me stuff, all right? And quit trying to baby me."

"Do you promise to stop terrifying me?" Rodney asked.

John sighed. "I promise to be more careful," he said. "I mean, I guess I do owe one to Kharoush, since he's the reason I'm not dead and all."

"Thank you." Rodney brightened. "And you know what, I think he must be recovering. Unless you regularly bench-press half a tree in your spare time, I mean."

"Yeah, I kinda figured that was him," John said. He even tried to sound enthusiastic about it. It didn't work. "Woulda been more helpful if it hadn't torn my bandage."

"Hey, symbiotes can only enhance strength so far," McKay said. "There's a limit based on the physical properties of muscle and bone. Like how Superman should break his ankles when he jumps over a tall building."

"I thought he was supposed to break the sidewalk," John muttered.

"Well same difference. The point is, it's a good sign," McKay said, oblivious. "If Kharoush is regaining consciousness, you might heal faster. Maybe he'll even wake up soon."

John searched for a good change of subject, and found one. "You better clean yourself up, too, you know," he said. "Last thing you need is an infection."

McKay waved his hand. "Tanys can--"

"Tanys told me you haven't been sleeping," he said, and was gratified by a look of indignant outrage on McKay's face. "Trading off with him so you can, I don't know, meditate or whatever doesn't count. You gonna practice what you preach or you gonna wait until I'm well enough to tie you down?"

"The Jaffa could've followed us up the mountain," McKay said. "I should--"

"Sleep," John said. "Because you set up that alarm thing, remember?"

McKay sighed and rubbed his eyes again. "Okay. Just let me, um, do the thing. Yeah."

He shuffled around the ship like a zombie for a little while, washing up in the water barrel and shrugging off his jacket only to leave it crumpled on the floor. Eventually he toed off his boots and shuffled to his sleeping pallet, sitting down in a heap. "Wake me up in a couple of hours, okay?" he said. "I need to check the...thingy."

"Perimeter?"

"That, too."

"I'll do that," John said, and then forced himself up on his elbows despite the pain to watch McKay flop over on his stomach with the blanket across his shoulders. Within a minute or two, he was snoring softly, his face gone slack, looking strangely young despite the stubble and the widow's peak.

Only when McKay's breathing had gone deep and steady, only when he seemed to be truly asleep, did John lever himself back down and shut his eyes. It was a while before he got any rest, and it had nothing to do with the pain in his stomach.


	7. Chapter 7

_"The problem with Rodney is that he's kind of crazy," Kharoush was saying._

_John snorted. "Really? I hadn't noticed."_

_"Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, young man." Which didn't make sense, because Kharoush was a boy this time, with a shock of gingery hair and pot belly. If not for the desert-camo uniform, he would've looked at home in a food court or a comic book store. "Rodney's problem is entirely that he's too proud to admit he is fallible. Or possibly scared. He pretends he made a clean break with Earth as if that will somehow make it true; he pretends that he isn't afraid because he thinks accepted the fear will paralyze him. He's not very good with people, you see, and that includes himself."_

_John sighed. "Why are you telling me this again?"_

_"So you'll be gentle with him." Kharoush snorted back at John's raised eyebrow. "I'm quite serious here. Your little heart-to-heart was a good idea, but don't expect him to actually change his behavior yet because you haven't drilled it into his head hard enough."_

_"That does not sound like a gentle metaphor."_

_Kharoush rolled his eyes. "Okay, just...be patient, I suppose. Which I realize you have been for a long time," he added quickly. "But keep it up. Because I like him, and I don't want to see you tear into each other. Once you get around the crazy parts, he's not such a bad guy."_

_"I'll take that under advisement," John said._

\\\\\

McKay was still sleeping when John woke up, with his face mashed into a small puddle of drool; John let him lie, while he carefully tested his torn muscles. Sitting up, while painful, was already possible; he wondered whether he owed that to Kharoush or not. He did a few stretches but decided against getting up and walking around just yet; he did strip off his t-shirt, which was now stiff from dried blood, and carefully flexed and straightened his much-maligned right leg until it stopped twinging.

Four hours later, McKay was still asleep, and John gave up on patience and climbed gingerly to his feet. He had enough stamina to hobble to the toilet, and get two orders of water and protein mush; he left one at the head of McKay's pallet and collapsed onto his own with the other. They really did have to address the food situation fast; hunting was probably out of the question, but there had to be edible plants out there somewhere they could gather. There had to be bugs, for Christ's sake, even with the weather growing colder.

At mid-day John remembered to open the doors for fresh air, and McKay still wasn't awake. It was chilly outside and there were clouds heavy with rain, and John took a moment to verify the drainage situation around the ship, because the last thing they needed was a flash flood coming through their front door. It looked good, though; by some stroke of luck, in the middle of crashing, Kharoush had oriented the whole rig so the main doors faced downhill. John gave him mental props for that, just in case he could hear.

Mid-afternoon, McKay rolled over in his sleep to sprawl on his back. This was the most notable sign of life from him all day.

John closed the doors at nightfall and turned on the lantern, but after futzing around with the controls for a little while he couldn't figure out how to bring up the map. He did manage to get the lantern to strobe in every color of the rainbow, though, which he supposed counted for something.

Dinner was more protein and water. Entertainment consisted of trying to remember the guitar tabs for Lynyrd Skynyrd's greatest hits, fingers fluttering in the air like he was sixteen again. About twenty hours after he finally crashed, Rodney snorted once, loudly, and went very still.

"Morning," John called over to him.

"Mmmrrgh." Rodney scrubbed at his face and sat up. "Morning already?"

"Well, no," he said. "It's evening. Again."

Watching this sentence make its way through Rodney's brain was the most fun John had had all day. When he realized what it meant, he jabbed an accusatory finger into the air. "You were supposed to wake me up!" he squawked.

"You needed the sleep," John said. "Besides, nothing much happened today."

"Which is exactly my point," he said. He found the protein mush from breakfast, now cold and tacky, and ate it anyway. "That's an entire day lost that I could've spent doing something productive."

"It was worth it," John said. "You've been looking kind of shitty lately, you know that?"

"Oh, gee, thanks." He visibly gagged on a bite of protein and choked it down with water. "Jesus, we need real food soon."

"Been thinking about that," John said. "The wildlife here's not supposed to be all that biochemically different from Earth life, so I figure anything that's safe for the animals here to eat is safe for us, right?"

Rodney blinked. "Did you just use the word 'biochemically?' What kind of a pilot are you?"

_A grounded one,_ John wanted to say. "My team had a biologist attached to it," he said. "That's why we were here. Doing a nature walk."

"Oh." Rodney shrugged and looked away from him. "I mean, um, I guess you're right, then. But I should try everything first. Tanys can protect me—"

"—yeah, yeah, Tanys is great." And the scratches on McKay's hands were almost healed now, so maybe Tanys was doing her thing again. But Tanys hadn't stopped McKay from running himself into the ground in the first place, and had in fact been helping, so John wasn't jumping on the whole 'in Tanys we trust' wagon any time soon. "So in the morning, we should look around for stuff. Before sun-up, so we've still got some darkness to work with."

"What's this 'we'?" Rodney asked. "Are you gonna be up for mountain climbing by sunrise?"

"I've been up and down a couple of times today," John said. "Hurts, but not in the bad way."

Rodney rolled his eyes. "Why do I bother talking to military types, anyway? You're all congenitally psychotic."

"You have obviously never been in physical therapy," John said.

"No, I was in physical therapy when I was paralyzed from the neck down," McKay corrected. "That didn't last much beyond 'wiggle your fingers,' though."

John had almost forgotten about that, oddly; now that he'd gotten used to McKay's perpetual motion, it was hard to picture him in a wheelchair. Which was probably how he'd seen it, too, given that he ended up with the Tok'ra. "It's like exercise," he tried to explain. "It's okay when you wake up after a long run and your legs are sore—that means you're doing it right. Bad pain is when you're in the middle of a run and something starts to hurt all of a sudden, you know?"

"No," McKay said. "Not much of a runner, because I have better things to do with my time than sweat."

John rolled his eyes. "You know, you were a lot nicer when you'd been awake for three weeks."

"I'm never _nice."_ McKay set aside the empty pouch of food and stood up with more of those alarming cracks from his back. "Though I am willing to concede that I may have needed the sleep."

"Oh, well, as long as you're conceding something..."

McKay wandered over to the kitchen area and looked at another pouch of mush, but didn't open it; instead he went over to the water barrel and washed his face. While he was still blinking water out of his eyes, he pulled off the dirty shirt he'd slept in, and John glanced up just at about the same time to ask a question he didn't even remember a moment later.

Rodney's shoulders were wide, and covered in scars; some were jagged, like old lacerations, but some had a surgical straightness, like the one right across the nape of his neck. _Thrown through a wall,_ right, that was how he'd gotten here; somehow Tanys had healed the nerves but not the skin. They were still really nice shoulders, though, and John caught himself staring, at least for the moment before Rodney seemed to remember he wasn't alone in the room; he snatched a clean shirt off the line in the same moment John tore his eyes away.

Because of course, the only way to make this situation more fucked up was to add some kind of Stockholm Syndrome to the mix. Christ.

"I'm gonna go to sleep," John said, while Rodney did up the laces on his shirt. "See you in the morning."

"Yeah, uh, sure," Rodney said, fumbling. "I mean of course. I mean good night."

John lay down facing the wall and listened to Rodney putter around for a long time before he fell asleep.

\\\\\

_"So you actually like McKay?"_

_"You get inured to his more distressing personality traits," Kharoush said, flicking long black hair out of his—her?--eyes. "Kind of like a room with a bad smell in it."_

_"Monkey house at the zoo," John said. "I'm gonna tell him you said that."_

_"Oh, he's well aware that he's a horrible person," Kharoush said. "He just rarely cares enough to try to moderate it."_

_"Which would be why he sucks at it."_

_Kharoush was tall and thin this time, and also a woman, which was messing with John's head more than a little bit. "You like him too, don't you?"_

_"He's all right."_

_"And his shoulders?"_

_John glared at him. Her. Whoever. "He's not my type," he said. "Also, there's the little matter of Don't Ask, Don't Tell."_

_"I see," Kharoush said. "So what is your type?"_

_"Short, athletic, and easy," John said._

_"And male?"_

_"I try not to think too much about that."_

_Kharoush laughed softly. "Because you want to fly airplanes."_

_"Because sometimes other things are more important."_

_"Airplanes are more important than sex?"_

_"Keeping promises is more important." He looked around the black beach glimmering under the coppery moon. It was wide and smooth as far as he could see. "What happened to all the cliffs and boulders and shit, anyway?"_

_"Your dream, your problem," Kharoush said with a small grin._

\\\\\

This was how they worked it out, over the next couple days: John took over any housekeeping task that didn't require long walks or heavy lifting, and McKay actually stayed around the ship for more than a few hours of daylight. He also, grudgingly, taught John to do some basic diagnostics on Goa'uld technology, and then seemed surprised when John was able to do it right on the first try. John, in return, dialed back on the exercising a little and sat still whenever McKay decided on another futile round with the hand device, sweeping it over the slick bandages, which now had little rings of grime stuck to their outer edges where it was hard to wash. He'd be glad to get rid of the damn things.

That first morning after the sleep marathon, McKay tossed John a cream-colored shirt that laced up the front. "Merry Christmas," he said. "Sorry it doesn't fit the whole Johnny Cash theme you've got going, but I can at least guarantee it's clean, and it'll keep you warmer than your luxurious pelt."

John studied the shirt before putting it on: the fabric was a coarse weave, but it had been made soft by wear and washing. It also fit him like a circus tent, so he was fairly certain it wasn't one of McKay's, which meant...well, there was only one other option left. "Thanks," he said without much enthusiasm, and rolled up the sleeves to his elbows so they wouldn't spill over his hands. Kharoush's previous host must've been one hell of a big guy.

"Well, it's not like anyone else is using it," McKay said gruffly. "Now, get over here and watch what I'm doing."

It mostly worked, this arrangement, except for how it meant his life was now All Rodney McKay, All The Time. The guy could not shut up, but he was an exceptionally bad communicator; he could hunch over a task for hours in a position that made John's vertebrae scream in sympathetic pain, but usually hovered in perpetual motion. He talked with his hands and his face gave everything away, yet half the time John didn't have a clue what was going on inside his head. He was, John would allow, kind of brilliant at what he was doing, as long as he was doing engineering and not medicine or cooking.

("It looks like spinach," Rodney protested. "What's wrong with spinach?"

"Spinach isn't supposed to be yellow."

"Try telling that to my mother.")

And he was, in his own way, kind of hot. No matter how many times John told himself this was a sign of mental illness, he started noticing how deft those big hands were, and how blue his eyes, and how good he looked when he actually smiled. It was, he allowed, nice to look at. But he had to be sure all he did was look, or else this was going to start getting really complicated, really fast. And the last thing they needed here were any more complications.

Among his many endearing features, McKay was liable to start holding forth on Ways In Which We Are Screwed at any given moment, and dinner—which now included sour berries, brown mushrooms and various sad, stringy greens—was prime lecture time. "I'm going to have to disassemble subspace communications," he said. "We need the extra crystals to get the navigational sensors back on line and I can use the main power couplings to get the inertial dampeners operational again."

"Inertial dampeners are good," John said. "A ship this massive must pull, what, a couple hundred Gs of acceleration just to get to escape velocity?"

McKay wagged a finger at him with a confused expression. "Stop that. Stop being smart. You're not supposed to contribute to this conversation."

"Sorry," John said. "That master's degree in aeronautics just keeps slipping out."

"Master's degree in..." McKay muttered, and stuffed his mouth full of greens savagely. When he was done chewing, he asked in an accusatory tone, "How the hell does a guy like you end up in the SGC?"

_An accident with a blood test,_ was the answer. But just for the pleasure of seeing the look on his face, John said, "Oh, I stole a helicopter."

He was not disappointed: McKay briefly gagged on his salad and looked at John like he had grown horns. "You—they—what? Did you steal it from George Hammond or something?"

"Something like that. Though Hammond's retired now."

"Thank god," McKay said, then backpedaled when he saw the look John was giving him. "I mean, you know, great for him and all. Just...we had some, uh, well, I don't think he liked me."

"I can't imagine why," John said, causing McKay to rolled his eyes for about the millionth time.

"So seriously, helicopter?" McKay asked. "How does that even work? I thought people got arrested for that."

"I did," John said. "Ducked a court-martial, though—long story short, I had a choice of reassignment between the SGC or McMurdo in Antarctica."

"Which may actually be worse than Siberia," McKay said with a little grimace.

John shrugged. "Only continent I've never been to before. But there's not much for a pilot to do when birds are all grounded for half a year at a time."

"I can see where that'd be a problem."

"Yeah." A big problem, all right; except at the SGC he didn't fly anything at all, hadn't for over a year. Just followed Sumner through the gate and listened to the old man's lecturing, the unspoken point always being: _you're not good enough for this. You'll never be good enough for this. If not for some hospital mix-up, you'd be out on your ass where you really belonged._ He was pretty sure Landry stuck him on SG-4 to deter any more bad behavior, as if giving him the strictest, most unpleasant CO on the base would somehow force him onto the straight and narrow. Or maybe it was supposed to be the prison time John never served. If anyone could suck all the joy out of exploring outer space, after all, it was Marshall Sumner.

John was thirty-seven years old and counting down to his retirement from what should've been the best job in the world, on any world. It occurred to him that was kind of fucked up.

McKay cleared his throat, and when John looked up he found himself being stared at kind of oddly. "I, uh, if you wanna...I mean, do we need more water? Because I can go get more water now that it's dark."

John grabbed McKay's empty bowl out of his hands. "We're good."

"Okay. If you're sure."

And in the interest of changing the subject as quickly as possible, John said, "I been meaning to ask you something, actually."

"Oh?"

"How far are we from Earth?"

"Really far," Rodney said blankly. "What kind of a question is that?"

Shrugging, John filled the bucket halfway for doing the dishes, and set it on the hot plate. "Just wondering where we go from here. Literally speaking. If Earth is closer--"

"It isn't," Rodney said. "I don't know how long I'll be able to keep the ship together once it's under full power, but there's a Tok'ra base that's just a few hours away through hyperspace."

"Whereas Earth is...?"

"Not even visible to the naked eye from here." McKay picked up some little doo-dad and started toying with it. "If you're worried that I won't keep my promises, Major, you don't have to. You can contact the SGC as soon as we land. Probably you can even go home while we look for Kharoush's permanent host."

"That's not what I was worrying about," John said, even though he kind of had been, a lot. It wasn't why he'd brought it up now, was the point. "I just thought you might like to visit the old homeworld for a while. See that niece you mentioned or whatever."

McKay scowled. "Thanks but no thanks. I'm far too busy for a vacation."

"We could drink a lot of coffee," John said. "Starbucks on every corner these days."

McKay looked at him suspiciously, like he thought John was messing with him. "Are you offering to be my tour guide or something?"

John shrugged and washed up the dishes with the same soap they used to shave. "Just saying, if you need an excuse for espresso and brownies, I'd give you one. You can say you're there to protect Kharoush from my self-destructive urges or something."

"Would I actually be there to protect Kharoush from your self-destructive urges?" Rodney asked warily.

"Nah," John said. "It's not snowboarding season."

Rodney thrust a finger in John's direction again. "That. Right there. I cannot tell when you're joking." John just smiled at him, and with a disgusted noise and a slight backward glance, Rodney shuffled off with the little doo-dad to begin work again.

\\\\\

_"You hate your job."_

_John looked away from the sunburnt little man beside him. "I think that's a strong word."_

_"You've actively considered not returning to Earth after a mission."_

_"I was drunk."_

_"You haven't flown in over a year."_

_"Not much_ to_ fly under a mountain."_

_"You told Nancy you hate it."_

_John stopped short. "Are you fucking around in my memories?"_

_"I'm just skimming what comes to the surface," Kharoush says. "The last time you talked to Nancy, you told her you hated the assignment. You just didn't tell her what it was."_

_"I hated Sumner and Landry," John said. "And we had just gotten back from Planet Shit-Smell. And she was talking about her new boyfriend."_

_Kharoush waved a hand vaguely. "Admit it. You married her because you're more honest with her than with anyone else in your life."_

_"She was basically my beard, you know."_

_"Okay. More honest on any subject other than that."_

_John kicked a piece of stone and sent it bouncing and skittering into the surf. "I married her because my dad liked her and I liked her and she wasn't going to be just one of those officer's wives who sits around throwing dinner parties."_

_"Low-maintenance, you mean?"_

_"You make her sound like a Toyota."_

_"That's how your marriage was, though," Kharoush said. "You put her away in a box in your head when you weren't around her. Then, take her out for a drive, for dinner, for a weekend. And once you were back on base, she went back in your brain garage."_

_"I never cheated on her, though," John said. "I didn't break any promises."_

_"That's a technicality when you never really kept them, either."_

\\\\\

As if they weren't busy enough now, John also took up the project of sorting out the useless crates and boxes—breaking some of them down into flat segments, nesting others inside one another. Some of the cases has a fine foam padding that he ripped out, over McKay's outraged protests, and stuffed into the pallets to even out the lumps.

"I might've still needed those, though," McKay said sulkily while pushing the excess padding around the pallet liner. "I could still find the lab."

"Thought you said the Jaffa had put a permanent presence at the bottom of the valley," John said.

He scowled. "Yeah. Well. Hope springs eternal."

John settled back on his new-and-improved pallet. "Do any of the Tok'ra even have the ATA gene? You know, for working this place, even if you do find it?" he asked.

"It's not necessary," Rodney said breezily. "There's nothing a gene carrier can do that can't be done manually with the right programming."

"Really?" John asked. "That's not what I hear."

Rodney rolled his eyes. "And which of us is an expert on the subject here?"

"I'm just saying," he said, not sure why he was pursuing the subject. "I hear around the SGC that some stuff just won't work until it's been unlocked by somebody with the gene. Like a security measure or something."

"Which just goes to show that the idiots I used to work with fail at imagination," Rodney said fiercely. "Using a gene-carrier might be the more _convenient_ way to initialize some of this technology, but given how vanishingly rare it is, in the long run it's going to be necessary to figure out how to work around it. Which I can."

"You can?" John echoed.

Rodney squirmed. "Yes. Given, you know, sufficient time and the right equipment. Almost certainly."

And John could've said, _by the way._ He could have said, _or I could help._ He could've admitted why the SGC took him on in the first place—unhappily, without welcome or pleasure, but they took him because of a blood test that he got by mistake and a recommendation from General O'Neill. Maybe Rodney would've let him start coming on his walkabouts, if he had. Maybe Rodney would've finally opened up about the last few things he was hiding, whatever they were.

But John didn't say anything, and the next thing Rodney said was, "Besides, it's not like we have much of a choice, seeing as I don't think any of the Tok'ra carry the gene. That seems to be pretty specific to Earth, so unless the SGC is going to let us, I don't know, rent out some of their personnel, we'll have to be able to work around it. I'm actually doing everyone a favor here, you know."

"Sure you are," John said, and was suddenly glad he hadn't spoken up. Because the last thing this situation needed was any more complications.

\\\\\

_The beach was level and wide and easy hiking in any direction, and Kharoush was fat and freckly and saying, "You're not a lightswitch."_

_"Try telling that to Bill Lee," John said._

_"You're not_ just_ a lightswitch."_

_"Doesn't matter, does it?" John kicked another stone into the receding surf. "The gene is the only reason the SGC wanted me. Everything else is just because they couldn't justify putting me on a permanent assignment to the labs. If it wasn't for some kinky-assed ancestor of mine, I'd have just been sent straight to McMurdo until they could get rid of me. Out of sight and out of mind till retirement."_

_"Or until you quit to fly traffic helicopters."_

_John didn't say anything to that._

_"Why don't you quit to fly traffic helicopters?"_

_"Fuck if I know," he admitted with a sigh. "Because the Air Force is where the good toys are, I guess, and there's always a chance I might get to fly again. Because my dad said I'd never be able to do it. Because it's a promise I can keep. Because even if they just want me for my genes, at least they_ want_ me, you know?"_

_"If I didn't know better, I would say you were in an abusive marriage."_

_He rolled his eyes. "Yeah, like what we've got going on is so much healthier. You literally only want me for my body."_

_Kharoush guffawed. "If you really believe that, you clearly have not been paying attention."_


	8. Chapter 8

Clearing out the useless packing materials eventually gave them more space to move around—well, that, and Rodney finally either replacing or incinerating all the disassembled parts he'd had spread across the room. More importantly, it also unblocked that set of double of doors near John's pallet, the ones McKay had barely looked at the entire time John had been on the ship. Supposedly they lead to the control room or cockpit or whatever a ship this size had, but he wasn't sure why McKay would block it off, especially when one of them (out of the four possible options) was going to have to fly this thing eventually. When John asked about them, Rodney just muttered something about priorities and one thing at a time, and wouldn't look him in the eye.

McKay, coincidentally, was outside looking for more Mystery Spinach the day after that enlightening conversation about the gene. Outside and out of earshot of the ship. Curiosity finally won out over practicality, and John opened the control room doors.

The same sunlight that glowed beyond the door curtains slanted dimly through the filthy front windows. They were smeared with black grime, the same stuff that stained the golden walls. The instruments arrayed before the two front seats had been destroyed, plain and simple: the metal was twisted and melted, the crystals cracked, greasy ashes clinging to everything. The right-hand seat didn't look like it was in too good a shape either, with big black patches, and big patches that were definitely not black; and there was a smell, a smell that John viscerally knew, the same smell as when he'd pulled Holland out of the wreck, the smell that was incongruously close to the smell of barbecue.

John had seen a lot of crashes, been in a lot of crashes, thought he was inured to the smell of blood on hot metal. But that was before Holland...and before Kharoush, because it made sense now, what had happened here. Perfect sense. It was just like when Holland had gone down, his crew burned alive and one of his legs a pulpy mess while John tried to carry him--

The doors suddenly snapped shut, millimeters from his face. A moment later, and arm forced him to turn around, and John found himself staring at a horrified McKay. "Sit down," Rodney was saying for some reason, "just, come on, just sit down for a minute."

John sat. Actually, it was probably more accurate to say his legs folded and his ass just happened to be pointing in the right direction. He sat on the last remaining big crate and realized he was hyperventilating a little, that the pins and needs in his hands and feet were real; he put his head between his knees for a minute and concentrated on taking deep breaths, one at a time, slow and steady. Eventually, his heart rate began to slow.

Rodney didn't seem to know what to do with himself; his hands danced over John's shoulders, like he wanted to offer a comforting touch, then retreated for a moment, only to reach out again. "I, um," he said. "Are you...well, of course you're not, I shouldn't...I mean, I should have...oh, hell, I don't know what I'm supposed to say here."

John swallowed a few times. "Tell me what happened."

"You mean, to, uh--"

"In there."

McKay crouched in front of John, but his eyes looked just about everywhere else. "I don't actually know," he said. "I was...I was back here, working on the engines, because the very first strike disabled our hyperdrive. I just heard him yell for me to brace myself, and then we were crashing...and I suppose a power conduit must've blown too close to one of the atmospheric-intermix vents. Those things have pure oxygen in them."

"Christ," John said.

"I...tried..." McKay said weakly, and had to clear his throat a couple times. "He was burned over most of his body, so I tried giving him fluids, painkillers...think I used up half our medical kit in the first day. I tried to use the tissue regenerator to stabilize him, but he was burned in his throat, his lungs...and then Kharoush said he was brain-dead. Said he was already gone."

John hadn't really thought of Kharoush's other host, not as a person; he'd just been another dead body that made John's life that much more complicated. He fisted his hands in his too-large shirt again, and for a moment, he felt ashamed. "What was his name?" he asked.

McKay's eyes snapped into focus for a minute. "Nurlan," he said. "Nurlan, son of...of somebody with a long name."

For a moment, Tanys emerged. "Nurlan, son of Erbolat, from a planet called Onkent," he said quietly, then retreated again.

John straightened up and looked into the shadowy recesses of the ceiling, the tip of the pyramid. "I stole that helicopter because a friend of mine crashed in Taliban territory," he said, because it seemed like the right thing to do, and he wasn't sure what else _to_ say. "He didn't make it."

"Is that why you...?" Rodney asked, but didn't seem to know how to finish the sentence.

"Yeah," John said, because that smell and all that blackened metal reminded him of a wrecked Pave Low in a red desert. Not because he remembered being in the control room when the oxygen ignited. Kharoush wasn't that deep in his head yet.

Rodney looked at the control room doors guiltily. "I should clean it up," he said. "I need to fix it. I just..."

"I know," John said. "I get it." He reached out and put a hand on Rodney's shoulder. Rodney looked up at him, surprised, those big blue eyes wide and distinctly wet.

He blurted out, "Thanks," and reached up to gently squeeze John's wrist. "Thanks for...you know."

"Yeah." John pulled his hand back, but for a moment they just sat there, not saying anything at all.

\\\\\

_"He was a good man," Kharoush was saying, wearing Nurlan's face. "He had status on his world, and he could've lived a life of comfort under the Goa'uld. He joined us because he believed in our cause, but right up to the moment we blended I think he still considered us gods."_

_"I'm sorry," John said, and found himself covering Kharoush's big hand with his own. The boulder was big and black and jagged, but it makes a good place to sit for a while. "I guess I didn't think..."_

_"That we mourn our hosts?" Kharoush asked. He turned his dark almond eyes on John. "When we know you so well, how can we do anything but mourn?"_

\\\\\

Something shifted after that, though John couldn't have said just what it was. Rodney talked more after that—or, well, it being Rodney, his constant babbling had more actual content. Most of it was about Kharoush and Nurlan.

"It was totally inexplicable," he said from where he was again buried waist-deep in a bulkhead. "It was like...like one day the captain of the hockey team sat down at my lunch table and asked me about my science fair project."

"Hockey team?" John asked.

"I'm Canadian, so yes, hockey team." Rodney wriggled out of his position and sat up, wiping at a smudge on his forehead. "I'll never understand why he liked me. For a while I didn't even believe he really did like, that it was just...well...I don't know, messing with me or something. But he did. He just _did._ He asked me questions and paid attention to the answers. Didn't understand the answers, of course, but he made the effort to seem...you know, engaged. He invited me to do stuff. It was...I guess it's what having a best friend is like."

John raised his own head from the pile of crystals he was testing. "You saying you never had friends before, McKay?"

He rolled his eyes in response. "Have you _met_ me?"

"You're not that bad," John said, only being partly charitable.

Rodey huffed. "Tanys has been a positive influence."

"...wow."

The last crystal came up as damaged, and John tossed it in the appropriate pile. Rodney climbed under the bulkhead again. "I mean, I realize that for people like you social connections just sort of fall into your lap like a shower of gold from the heavens," he continued blithely, "but I'm not used to people liking me for anything that doesn't have to do with copying off my exams."

"People like me?" John asked, rolling his shoulders. The left one still dinged him, but it was nearly healed. "What kind of people is that?"

"You know," he said, waving a hand under the edge of the bulkhead. "Captain of the hockey team types. Or football, I guess, for you. Handsome and socially functional and a _pilot,_ for Christ's sake—you're one bucket of hair gel away from running for public office."

John was still trying to figure out whether Rodney thought before he said these things, or if maybe the thinking was actually the problem. "What makes you think I'm socially functional?" he asked.

"Well, you're in the military," Rodney said. "That kind of presupposes you play well with others. Hoo-rah and all that?"

John snorted. He wondered what Sumner would think of that. _Major Sheppard plays well with others, provided those others are neuroatypical scientists allied with an alien insurgency. To everyone else, he's a little shit._ "Depends on the others, I guess," is what he said.

Rodney went silent for a while. "I, uh," he stammered. "I didn't mean to, uh, that is...if you don't...well, of course you don't want to talk about them."

As usual, it took John a minute to jump the tracks of thought, and when he did he got a funny feeling in his stomach that had nothing to do with his wounds. "It's fine," he said, but his voice sounded funny in his ears. "They were...good people."

"Yeah?" Rodney asked tentatively.

"Yeah." John knew he could end it there, change the subject. Knew he probably should. He'd successfully avoided thinking too hard about it for weeks, being preoccupied with his own injuries, with Rodney and the Jaffa, with his brand-new lodger. There'd be time later, back on Earth, to worry about these things. Time to deal.

So he wasn't entirely sure what made him add, "Well, Sumner was kind of an asshole, but the others were all right." Maybe just to hear Rodney choke on a guffaw.

"Was he, uh, who was he?" Rodney asked after a minute.

"Commander," John said. "Marine. _Really_ a Marine, hoo-rah and all. I don't think he liked me, either, so the feeling was mutual."

"Huh." Rodney made something rattle. "I sort of assumed you were in charge. You know, with the rank."

"Stolen helicopter, remember?" John said. "They only wanted me in the program because..." He almost said _because of my genes,_ but remembered at the last minute to skirt it. "...because General O'Neill likes me. And don't ask me why, 'cause I gave up trying to figure out how he thinks."

"You presume that he does think," Rodney said darkly.

John snorted. "Yeah. So I think they put me on Sumner's team to keep me from running off with the gate or something. Or maybe he pissed somebody off and we were both getting punished, I don't know."

"What about the other guys?" Rodney asked. "Did you at least like them?"

John shrugged. "I didn't really know them. Garcia just got commissioned, and Hughes was kind of a substitute since Schachter got pregnant..." They were just faces, people John knew, and he'd liked them, sure, but at the end of the day it wasn't like he went out for beers with them or anything. Garcia had some other friends, guys who'd been in his class at the Air Force Academy, and Schachter had a husband and kids, and Hughes was scared of his own shadow when you could get him to notice it...

And they were good people. Good, dead people. John sighed, and toyed with one of the cracked crystals. Dead on a mission that was supposed to be a nature walk.

McKay cleared his throat. "I, uh...I don't know if you, um, if you want to hear this or not. But the Jaffa...they didn't take them away. The, uh, the others. Just their things. So I went back with a zat'nik'tel and...took care of them."

Right. Zats disintigrate on the third shot if you time it right. He'd probably done the same for Nurlan. "Did you get their tags?" John asked.

There was a pause. "I didn't think of that."

"Don't worry about it." It wouldn't be the first time the SGC had had to bury an officer without tags. And at least they weren't laying exposed in the forest. He only wished he'd been able to handle it himself. "Thanks."

"Well, what was I supposed to do?" Rodney said, suddenly huffy. "I couldn't just...I mean, I may be an asshole, but I'm still _human."_

And for some reason, that made John laugh. "Yeah, you are."

\\\\\  
_  
"You're not a very happy person, are you?" Kharoush asked._

_"I'm happy enough," John said. He deliberately stomped in a tide pool just to see the water splash._

_"The absence of pain is not the same as pleasure," Kharoush said. "Why didn't you go to Antarctica?"_

_"Bottom of the world," John said. "End of the road. It was just one step away from sending me to the corner to think about what I'd done." And when he could hardly bear to look at himself in the mirror, he hadn't been sure he could bear that much time for self-reflection. People went crazy down there for a reason._

_Kharoush shrugged, like this was hardly a concern. "You could've flown, though."_

_"Half a year at a time," John reminded him._

_"And the SGC...?"_

_"They told me I would get to fly spaceships." John laughed. "Should've known the don't give spaceships to people like me."_

_"And what kind of people are those?"_

_Kharoush was an awkwardly tall, skinny man with a pudding-bowl haircut and an overbite; John had to look up to look him in the face, and so he might as well just look even further up and over, past him, to the burnished-copper moon in its descent. "Everything I've ever done, I've fucked it up. Even when I was doing the right thing I did it wrong. College, Air Force, marriage....the only reason I didn't go to prison was my old man pulling the strings to avoid another public embarrassment, and I don't think I can ever forgive him for that. I should never have been promoted. I sure as hell shouldn't be free."_

_"So you've taken it upon yourself to mete our your own punishment?"_

_He looked away. "You make me sound like some kind of nut."_

_"You are not giving me a lot of evidence to the contrary."_

_"I'm good at what I do," John said. "Most of the time. I can fly helicopters and shoot people and stuff. I'm not afraid of getting hurt."_

_"Really? Not at all?" Kharoush asked. "Because it seems to me like everybody's supposed to be afraid of getting hurt. Pain is, by definition, bad."_

_"Other things are worse. Sometimes a little pain is worth it."_

_"What about death?"_

_"I'm not afraid of dying."_

_"That's not courage, John, that suicidal ideation."_

_"What the hell do you know about it?" John asked. "You're fucking immortal or something."_

_"I know what death is," Kharoush said sharply. "I've known loss. I've been hunted by the System Lords for longer than your civilization has been capable of working in iron, and I have mourned dozens of hosts."_

_John looked away from that, for a moment, watching his own feet crunch on the rocks. "I'm not a masochist," he finally said. "I'm just...I'm the one who has nothing left to lose, you know? It's not like anyone is gonna miss me."_

_"I'll miss you," Kharoush said, and surprisingly John found he believed him._

\\\\\

They had to clear the control room eventually, of course; this time John was ready for it, the smell and the blackened metal, and he went in first with a rag and a bucket to wash down the windows and clear out the worst debris. Rodney came in later, checking the controls and muttering to himself and not looking at the pilot's seat if he could help it. It took an entire day to coax up the controls into functionality, and Rodney only gave it a cursory check before shutting it down again. "Everything's getting full power, and I can just shut down the ventilation up here and leave the doors open, rather than messing around with that damaged intermix chamber," he said. "So the real question is getting the engine on line."

"And then we're good to fly?" John asked.

"And then we're good to keep working," Rodney said. "I've done everything I can on auxiliary power, but the engines are the main generator for this thing, and until we get them operating I can't bring more than one thing up to full power at a time."

John nodded. "That's gonna raise our energy signature, though, right? Maybe get some more attention?"

"Well, ideally, I'll have time to reconfigure the cloak to scatter the energy signature," Rodney said. "I don't have enough power on auxiliary to that now and still run, you know, the lights and the toilet and things."

That meant opening up yet another bulkhead, revealing a space about the size of a walk-in closet. There were more panels of instruments there, trays with racks of crystals, and in the center a large, transparent cylinder with more cylinders nested inside it. It looked like a warp core from Star Trek, and John had to bite his tongue to avoid saying so (as he'd learned, by now, that it would only lead to rant from Rodney on scientific accuracy and the intellectual bankruptcy of Lawrence M. Krauss). Rodney prodded a few of the panels to life and then opened them up, and a dim light began to flicker in the main cylinder.

"Anything I can do? John asked, eying the narrow space.

Rodney unfolded a rack of crystals and started prodding it. "Hmm. Just stand there and look pretty for now."

John leaned against the doorway and sighed. "You know, McKay, if you keep saying that you're gonna make me blush," he muttered, aiming for a breezy tone.

Surprisingly, Rodney's face suddenly flamed. "I, uh, sorry. I just—sorry."

"Don't worry about it," John said, picking at a rough edge on his thumbnail. "I bet you say that to all the guys."

"Not really, no," Rodney said, eyes bulging. "I mean, you know, obviously, Tanys and—I know it's, uh, complicated, but—but, uh, but we have this saying, that the host and the symbiote love as one, and that really goes both ways, so I don't...and you shouldn't feel...I mean, maybe I shouldn't joke about this kind of thing..."

"Stop right there for a second," John said, as he tried to parse that utterance. He didn't like the answers he was coming up with at all. "Are you saying your symbiote is...is _interested?"_

"Well, no," Rodney said. "By which I mean yes. By which I meant, uh, Tanys and Kharoush are sort of...mates."

"Please tell me," John said slowly, lowering his hands, "that you're using that word the British way."

"Sorry," Rodney said quietly, looking sheepish.

With dawning horror John tried to rearrange everything else he'd assumed so far about, well, everything. "So you and Nurlan...?"

"Oh, god, no," Rodney. "That's what I'm trying to _say._ Just because they've been together for some insane number of centuries doesn't mean we're obligated do anything. And Nurlan and I...no." He grimaced. "Just...not happening. Not like that."

_But you think I'm aesthetically interesting,_ John said, feeling strangely dizzy. What he eventually asked was, "So is that why you got sent here together?" he asked. "Because they're...together?"

Rodney started to answer, stopped, thought about it. "Maybe," he said. "I didn't think about it that way. Huh."

He buried his face in the wall panel, and John looked away, brain working furiously. Mates. _Some insane number of centuries._ What the hell was he supposed to make of _that?_ Rodney hadn't exactly made a move on him, beyond the awkward stammering, but he kept teasing him and calling him pretty and going on about how smart he was, and oh yeah, their symbiotes had been in love for centuries. How did that even work? When had he been planning on mentioning that to John?

When did John start thinking of him as _Rodney?_

"So were you planning on bringing this up, um, ever?" John asked. "Just for reference."

Rodney's shoulders went rigid. "No," he said. "No, I wasn't, actually, since if everything goes according to plan you and Kharoush will be parting ways in a couple of days."

Right. Of course. This didn't even apply to John, in the long run. Except for the part where it totally did. He scrubbed his face and looked again at Rodney, at his lopsided scowl and hunched shoulders. Not that Kharoush was getting into John's head or anything, because he was still him, he'd be the first to know...wouldn't he? "Yeah," he said, mostly to remind himself. "Couple of days."

"And since it will only be a couple of days," Rodney said, suddenly slamming a hatch shut and opening another, "if you'd be so kind as to keep your heterosexual panic to yourself, Major, I'd really appreciate it. I'm quite aware of where I'm not wanted and can handle myself accordingly."

"'Heterosexual panic'?" John echoed, once again chasing after Rodney's train of thoughts.

"You know, the usual response of testosterone-soaked military types to anything that threatens their narrow definition of masculinity," he said savagely. "Or whatever it is my sister says. Just spare me, all right?"

"I haven't even said anything," John said, uncrossing his arms.

Rodney slammed another hatch and opened the next. "Please, the look on your face said enough."

Oh, Christ. "You just dropped a hell of a bombshell on me, McKay!" John protested. "What kind of face am I supposed to have?"

Rodney rolled his eyes. "You're part of one of the most homophobic institutions in the developed half of your planet--"

"You know, you're jumping to conclusions awfully quick--"

"Just shut up for a minute!"

"Like hell I'm gonna--"

"Just _shut up!"_ John realized a moment too late that McKay's face had fallen and gone alarmingly white. He slammed the hatch shut and crossed to the engine cylinder, where he opened up a piece of floor grating and dropped to his knees. "Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no...it can't be, it can't...no...what?"

"You gonna give me some full sentences any time soon?" John asked.

"Shut _up,_ Major!" Rodney snapped. He plunged his arms into the grating and, after a few minutes of grunting and swearing, pulled out another large glass cylinder banded with metal rings. They appeared to be the only thing keeping the shattered fragments of the cylinder from falling apart entirely. He looked at this the way you might look at a dying family pet. "That's it. We're screwed. We're going to die."

"What's the matter?" John asked. "What is that?"

"This _was_ the primary power exchange coil," Rodney said viciously. "It is currently a very elaborate paperweight."

John crouched down to look at the grimy glass—or maybe it was crystal—crazed and chipped like it'd been crushed and rolled. "Something tells me you can't fix this."

"No, I can't fix it," he snapped back, gripping the device with white knuckles. "I can't replace it, either, and I sure as hell can't work around it because this is only the most crucial piece of equipment on the entire damn ship. Without this we don't have shields, we don't have life support, we don't have navigation, and, oh yeah, we don't _fly._ We are stuck here until either the Lion Guard find us or we starve to death during the winter."

"There's got to be another way," John said immediately.

Rodney rolled his eyes. "Do you listen to me when I talk? Do you understand English? I just said that there isn't any other way! It's like trying to run a car without a transmission! A PC without any memory! Even if I can get the engines online now, they're good for nothing but a nightlight, because there's no way to send the power to any other part of the ship. I could run them until they explode and it wouldn't move us an inch!"

"Okay," John said. "So we need to replace that...thingy."

"Replace it?" Rodney echoed. "Did you happen to pass a Intergalactic Pep Boys the last time you were outside? Because I haven't seen one!"

"Actually," John said, "I was thinking of the Jaffa."

He had the gratifying moment of actually striking Rodney speechless, nothing but bulging eyes and incoherent sputtering for about ten full seconds. "Are you _damaged?"_ was the first coherent thing he actually managed to say. "I mean, seriously, does the SGC put something in your _water?"_

"They've got ships, haven't they?" John asked. "Seems to me the parts ought to be compatible."

"There about about eighty of them and two of us!" Rodney said. "How exactly are we supposed to get hold of one of their ships without getting murdered?"

"We're gonna die anyway if we stay here doing nothing," John said, standing up. "What difference does it make if we starve to death in here or get shot down there?"

"A plan that is doomed to failure is not actually a plan," Rodney said.

"I'm not giving up," John said. "Not like this. I'm not letting the last three weeks be for nothing."

At that, something in Rodney's composure seemed to crack. He averted his eyes first, then lowered his chin. It took him a few minutes to actually spit out the words, "Fine. We'll give it a try. At least our deaths will be quick and agonizing."

"And we're gonna be in this together the whole way," John said significantly.

"You still get winded walking around the ship sometimes," he pointed out, rolling his eyes.

John found himself grabbing Rodney's shoulders. "We're in this together or not at all, McKay. You and me."

Rodney looked into his eyes for a moment, and he grimaced, but then nodded. "Okay. Together." And when John raised an eyebrow, he said firmly, "I promise, all right? Partners, for whatever that's worth."

"Partners," John said, and made him shake on it.


	9. Chapter 9

They spent the rest of the day doing recon, or at least the level of recon they were capable of. Rodney lead John out to a high ridge a little bit east of of the ship, one that sported a saggy jumble of uneven cliffs on its north face. He fussed about their footing and kept grabbing at John's sleeve when there was even a suggesting of him wobbling, but in the end they had a commanding view of the whole valley, and the river that burst out of the ravine to make a glittery squiggle in the foothills. John could see, now, the Jaffa's camp: it was situated on a low bluff of land with water on three sides, though the river seemed to be shallow enough that it wouldn't be much of a barrier to foot travel. SG-4 had come within a hundred yards of the damn thing without noticing anything, at least until they were attacked. If they'd gone north instead of south coming out of the gate, they might've missed it entirely.

"There's about eighty of them, like I said," Rodney told him, and passed him a little pair of binoculars. "They patrol in two shifts, but half the ones not on patrol are usually standing guard inside the camp. They've got two cargo ships, which they mainly use for storage, and a flight of death gliders, though most of them are on the ground at any given time. Only the cargo ships have a compatible distribution coil, and all of them are going be locked out with codes known only to the Lion Guard, so don't even think about jacking one—activating the computer without the code puts the whole ship into lockdown and traps us inside."

"I see 'em," John said. The cargo ships reminded him a little bit of snails; he was pretty sure they were of the same model he and Rodney were living on. The ships were all parked on an improvised airfield on the east side of the camp, which was a neat grid of tents and what seemed to be prefabricated buildings made of metal or plastic panels. They had piled felled trees around their perimeter as a crude sort of fencing, and John could see the gold and silver helmets of the guards on patrol. "If we can get past the guards in the trees, those logs don't make much of a fence."

"They're not the fence," Rodney said grimly. "They've got an electronic perimeter monitoring system set up. It'll recognize Lion Guards, but anything else larger than about a beagle gets electrocuted. Though I might be able to hack into their system remotely and disable that."

"How long would that take?" John asked.

"How should I know?" he said harshly. "Inanna isn't exactly a high roller among System Lords, so they probably don't have state-of-the-art equipment, but still, it could take me anywhere from twenty minutes to four hours to break the encryption and disable any failsafes."

"We can't park our asses in the woods for four hours while you work on their computer," John said. "We need to think of something else."

Rodney rolled his eyes. "What would you suggest, a frontal assault?"

John checked through the binoculars again. "Something like that." He waited until Rodney stopped spluttering. "I think one of us needs to get inside that fence."

Tanys suddenly spoke up. "Some of the patrols range far from the camp, and they communicate poorly. If we surprise one of them, we could steal their armor and sneak inside."

"Which is among the stupidest ideas I've ever heard," Rodney said as soon as he was back in control. "Seeing as the last few times we've taken on the Lion Guard have gone so well for us and all."

"That wasn't what I was thinking anyway," John said. He gave the binoculars back to Rodney. "I think one of us needs to surrender. Hear me out," he said, before Rodney could go into full-tilt rant mode. "You're a Tok'ra agent. I'm a Tau'ri officer. If there's anything most of the System Lords can agree on, it's that they want to crush the Tok'ra and take over Earth, right? Plus, they're gonna want to know what we know about what they're doing here, in case we rat them out to somebody. That makes us too valuable to shoot outright."

"Because they've shown such restraint so far," Rodney said witheringly.

"So we go in unarmed," John said. "Play lame. Offer to talk in exchange for mercy. They gotta realize that we're running short on supplies. Probably think we're injured, since we've been laying low."

"And when they throw us into a dungeon?" Rodney asked. "What then?"

John pointed at the camp below. "Do you see a dungeon? I don't see a dungeon. I see some canvas tents and prefab huts that I could probably take apart with my bare hands. They didn't come here to take prisoners, they came here for a treasure hunt. We can use that."

"Let me get this straight," Rodney said, rubbing his eyes. "Just for clarity's sake. You want one of us throw himself upon the tender mercies of the same Jaffa who've been trying so industriously to kill us for the past month or so. Your best-case scenario is for this sacrificial lamb to then be locked up and placed under guard in the middle of a camp with at least forty Jaffa inside it at any one time, who must then engineer a single-handed jailbreak in order to infiltrate one of their ships and steal spare parts. This individual must then escape from the camp and avoid another forty Jaffa in the woods in order to get back to the ship to effect repairs, all of which must be completed before the Lion Guards track us down and use us for target practice."

John squirmed. "Well, of course it sounds dumb when you say it like that."

Rodney laughed weakly and looked through the binoculars again.

"So the idea needs work," John admitted. "But I figure one of us gets in there, shuts down their power supply—assuming that'll kill the perimeter sensors?"

"Actually—"

"Even if it doesn't," John said loudly, before Rodney could build up a good head of steam, "We shut down their power supply as a diversion. And whoever's inside lets the other in, however that works, and we get the spare parts together. We can be in an out before they get the lights back on."

"You think," Rodney said. "We have no idea what the actual conditions inside that camp will be."

"So we do a little more recon," John said. "But it's no more risky that jumping a Lion Guard and stealing his big stupid helmet."

Rodney's eyes flashed. Tanys said, "You have not specified which of us will enter the camp first."

There was that, and John immediately knew where this was heading. "I've had special ops training," he said.

"I have escaped from more dangerous enemies than these many times before," Tanys said.

"They're not going to see me as the same degree of threat," John said. "Toddlers and all."

"You are still weak," Tanys said. "And you do not know how to manipulate Goa'uld technology."

"I'm a fast learner," John said.

Rodney came forward again, rolling his eyes. "If we can reign in the pissing contest for a moment?" he said. "Since you're obviously not going to back down from a chance to throw yourself into yet more danger, why don't we, I dunno, flip a coin or something? Draw straws? Rock Paper Scissors?"

John searched through his pockets, but there was nothing to make a good coin substitute; after a minute, he took off his dog tags and disconnected one of them from the chain. "Front or back, winner gets to go in. You want to flip or should I?"

"Go ahead," Rodney said, but he was watching suspiciously. "Though I'd hardly say a suicide mission is something you really want to win."

"I got this thing about suicide missions, actually," John said.

It wasn't as easy to flip as a coin would be, but after two false starts John got the slim piece of metal to spin in the air and land in his palm. He covered it with his other hand for a moment, calling out as he did so, "Front,"

"I wanted the front," Rodney said immediately.

"Too bad, so sad." He uncovered the tag to reveal his name and Social Security number to the sun. "And it looks like I won."

"Or lost, from my perspective," Rodney said stiffly. He was scowling so hard that his mouth looked lopsided; he snatched the binoculars back and stretched out on his stomach, which just happened to put his back to John. "Of course, this all depends on our ability to figure out where their power source _is..."_

"We've got a couple more days of supplies left," John said. "We can scope it out pretty well in advance."

"Hmm." Rodney dropped the binoculars again and stared grumpily into the middle distance. "Well, for your sake, I hope so."

\\\\\

They spent the rest of the afternoon climbing around cliffs, looking for the best vantage point from which to observe the camp; come nightfall, they ate in silence and collapsed onto their respective beds. John's whole body ached from the unexpected activity, but it was still the good, healing ache, and he ran his hands over the dressing on his stomach without feeling pain. Maybe he could pull this plan off after all.

He heard McKay start to snore, but then suddenly he stopped. In the darkness, Tanys spoke up. "Major Sheppard."

"Looking for a bedtime story?" he asked.

"Rodney is not aware that your dog tags are embossed," he said quietly.

"And you are?"

"I noticed it while cleaning your wounds." Tanys paused. "You hesitated for a moment before you called the flip. You had time to determine by touch that the embossed side was facing up."

John stared up into the darkness. "I guess I did, didn't I? You gonna tell him that?"

"If I intended to, he would already know."

"Thanks."

There was a long pause, and John wondered if Tanys, too, had dropped off into sleep, but he spoke again one last time. "You are an exceptional man, Major Sheppard. I hope you appreciate that."

"I bet you say that to all the guys," John muttered, think about _some insane number of centuries._

"You are more than the sum of your capabilities," Tanys added earnestly. "Remember that."

He didn't know what exactly that was supposed to mean, but the snoring started again, so he never got to ask.

\\\\\  
_  
"Technically speaking, there's three sexes of symbiotes, one of which is sterile," Kharoush was saying. He was a woman again, a petite woman with a fresh-coffee complexion and tight cornrows that ended with clusters of pale wooden beads. "Fertile females are vanishingly rare, probably because they spawn hundreds of young at a time. Or maybe they spawn so fast because they're so rare. Chickens and eggs."_

_"So what's that got to do with symbiotes in love?" John asked._

_"Not much, actually," Kharoush said with a shrug. "Symbiote reproduction is not actually a particularly interesting process. And considering we spend so much of our life cycles in human hosts, emotionally it's almost irrelevant."_

_"So are you a man or a woman?" John asked._

_Kharoush grinned, showing a gap in his...her...Kharoush's front teeth. "Shall we really have a conversation about the construction of a gender and sexual identity now?"_

_John kicked at the black stones under his feet. "You know, I think I know what some of those words mean."_

_They walked in silence for a few minutes, the copper moon riding the fringe of the distant cliffs. "Some symbiotes have a strong connection with either male or female hosts," Kharoush finally said. "Some of us just have a preference. All Tok'ra have to take whatever host is available to us, because beggars can't be choosers...we will change hosts so many times, and we will learn from all of them, and as Rodney told you, the host and the symbiote love as one."_

_"So did Tanys make Rodney gay?" John asked._

_"She did nothing of the sort."_

_"Wait,_ she?"__

_Kharoush sighed. "This is what I'm saying. Tanys generally considers herself feminine, but her previous host was aged and dying when Rodney offered to join us. She could have refused him, and waited to see if a woman would come along, but she decided that in the long run, a host that she liked and got along with was more important than a host of her preferred gender. So she blended with Rodney. This does not make Rodney a woman, or make Tanys masculine, and it certainly doesn't make anyone 'gay,' whatever that even means. They are what they are, which is far more complicated and nuanced than your culture seems prepared to allow."_

_"How's that nuance working out for you two?" John asked._

_Kharoush shrugged again. "I blended with Nurlan when he was only thirty years old. Tanys' host Maya was already over a hundred and fifty. That changed our physical relationship. When Maya died and Tanys blended with Rodney, that changed it again, because Nurlan and Rodney felt no physical attraction to one another, even if they became dear friends."_

_"So you two haven't had sex in...?"_

_"You are viewing it in the wrong terms," Kharoush said wearily. "There are so many dimensions of love, so many qualities of it. I love Tanys and have loved her a thousand years or more. I love Rodney, even though in comparison I have only known him a short while; I loved Nurlan, who I knew as only a symbiote can know his host. Nurlan and Rodney loved each other, even if neither of them might've chosen that particular word to describe it. The nature of these relationships are all different, but they're all love."_

_John turned this over in his head. "So you're saying that Tok'ra mates don't care about having a sexual relationship if their hosts aren't into it?"_

_"Sex is a part of love, but it's not the only or even most important part," Kharoush said. "You know that as well as I do."_

_He thought about Nancy, and flinched._

\\\\\

Over the next two or three days, they spent a lot of time scoping out the Lion Guard camp, both with the binoculars and with the ship's passive sensors (after Rodney's epic afternoon spent recalibrating their focus to cover the camp). They tried to keep track of the shift changes and building plans, and tentatively identified the bunks, the mess, the commander's quarters, the latrines. "What about the generator?" John asked. "Can we know for sure where that's at?"

Rodney pointed out a building on the hologram, shuffling around to one side as it rotated away from him. "This one here. It's got the biggest energy signature, and they're almost completely ignoring it...don't want to question the mysteries of their gods and all. One nice thing about an enemy that's completely brainwashed is they have very limited knowledge of how their own technology works, so once you shut it down it'll take twenty, maybe even thirty minutes for the failsafes to kick in and bring it back online without help."

"That enough time to get the parts we need?" John asked.

"Of course not," Rodney said. "But it's what we've got to work with, so quit complaining."

They watched their enemies and planned their attack, and John insisted Rodney make himself a wish list of parts to steal—on the very off chance this went well, he intended to stuff his backpack. In the more likely case this went poorly, he also said, "We need to be ready to fly out of here as soon as we get back here with the flux capacitor."

"For the last time, it's called a—look, why do I even bother?" Rodney rubbed his face. "It'll take some time to bring the main engines up after I install the new coil. It's entirely possible there will be explosions and fire when I do, either because I've missed massive damage or because my improvised repairs will fail under a full current load. And that's ignoring the fact we'll have to deal with the flight of gliders in orbit, until I get the hyperdrive into operation."

"So the engines are first priority, shields second, hyperdrive third," John said. "Anything else we absolutely need to fix before we can bug out of here?""

"Well, life support and navigation would be nice," Rodney said. "But I suppose, if we're already jumping headlong into the abyss, we can leave those until we've gotten clear of this planet. It's not like the Lion Guard will be able to track us through hyperspace, so unless there's a hull breach I haven't detected yet...."

Rodney could spend hours detailing things he might've missed or had been unable to check for, so John cut him off. "Engines, shields, hyperdrive," he said. "What do we need to do to have those ready to go online?"

"About a hundred things, most of which I can't actually do correctly until I have main power," Rodney said. John glared at him, and he sighed again. "I'll see what I can do."

During the day they worked and they planned, keeping a physical distance from each other and talking only when they needed to. At night John lay awake, listening to Rodney snoring, thinking _the host and the symbiote love as one,_ even if he still didn't quite follow what that meant. He thought about _you are worth more than the sum of your capabilities._ He thought about _just sit there and look pretty._

It didn't mean anything at all, though. They were either going to die or go home, and everything was going to go back to normal quickly enough. Once Kharoush was gone, he'd never have a reason to see these people...okay, this people and these things...ever again. He might not even feel the same once Kharoush was gone, or Rodney might not, and even if they did he was still an Air Force officer. He had a mission to finish and he didn't need these complications.

_I guess it was like having a friend._

John didn't sleep a whole lot.

\\\\\

Eventually, the protein decided it. They looked at the last pouch in the container, and Rodney, very suddenly, said, "Dibs."

"Dibs?" John asked incredulously.

"I'm hypoglycemic," Rodney said.

"You've got Tanys," John said.

"You've got Kharoush."

"I've got a hole in my stomach!"

"Well, not anymore!"

Tanys suddenly stepped in with a long-suffering sigh. "Take the rations, Major," he (she?) said. "You have greater need of them that we."

John didn't actually want the mush, and gave Rodney half of it anyway. "We've got to do it tonight," he said, toying with the frayed cuff of his shirt. "No more choice in the matter."

Rodney tried to inhale while licking the spoon and ended up gagging. "Are you sure?" he asked, looking worried. "I mean, I could look for more Mystery Spinach--"

"Tonight," John said. "We've put it off too long as it is. What are the moons going to be doing?"

Rodney, for some reason, checked his watch. "Silver Surfer should rise about sunset, but it'll only be a quarter phase. Hulk should be up around midnight, and gibbous. Not a lot of light."

"That's more your problem than mine," John said. He looked down at his Tok'ra shirt and the shiny white bandages underneath it. "They're gonna search me when they catch me," he said. "I gotta take these dressings off."

"It's gonna hurt," Rodney said. "Like, horrible-zipper-accident hurt. Especially because you're hairy."

"So does getting killed by Jaffa who think I'm a Tok'ra spy," he said. "I'll tear up my other uniform shirt and wrap everything up so they can't see the wounds, but just in case...."

It hurt exactly as badly as Rodney said, and the ones on his stomach and leg took away bits of skin with them, which made the improvised bandages actually necessary; on the whole, though, there was nothing underneath but fragile new skin that was pink-pale from lack of sunlight. He might still be weak, but he was very nearly healthy again. John put on his whole shirt over the bandages, but he gave his jacket to Rodney in spite of the cold. "It's not much, but it'll give you better cover in the darkness than white will," he said, while Rodney stared at it dumbly.

Rodney nodded, fisting his hands in the cloth. "I, uh...thanks. Yeah." He swallowed. "We're really going to do this, aren't we?"

"Last chance," John said. "You gonna be able to keep up your end?"

Rodney nodded, looking sick, but Tanys came forward and schooled his face. "We will be waiting for you when the time comes." he said calmly. "Good luck, Major."

"Same to you," John said. He shouldered his rifle—more of a prop than a mode of defense, considering what he was about to do—and ducked through the curtain, stepping out into the chilly reds and purples of the evening.

He was almost to the treeline when he heard Rodney call out, "Wait! John, wait!" John froze, the hair on the back of his neck standing up, but didn't look back. "Just...be safe, okay?"

He didn't trust himself to speak, so he gave a thumbs-up over his shoulder. Then he was into the darkening woods, and the ship, and Rodney, were invisible behind him.


	10. Chapter 10

At first he followed the same path he had the last time he'd left the ship, down through the valley, avoiding anything that might leave tracks—their plan was shot if one Lion Guard showed enough initiative to trace John's backtrail. The regular hikes to and from their lookout points had helped build up some strength in his legs again, though he still didn't know how he'd hold up if he had to run. The cold breeze coming down the slope of the mountain cut right through him, stripping away the sweat of his exertion almost before he felt it, as the sky went from purple to navy to darkness. He moved as quickly as he dared down the valley, staying just clear of the tangled river banks, with the idea that if he moved fast enough he wouldn't start to shiver.

The white moon was just cresting the eastern ridge when he got to the place where he'd met the Jaffa the second time—he recognized the fallen tree limb, which now looked impossibly large. He couldn't hear the sentries, but the sensors had shown them nearby...which meant he had to get into character. From that point on John crossed to the edges of the ravine, making no attempt to keep to cover, and exaggerated the limp on his bad leg. He hunched his shoulders, and curled his left hand loosely around the stock of his P-90, as if he couldn't really move it. That was about the limit of his acting ability, and he hoped he'd be convincing enough to fool the Lion Guards, when he found them. If he wasn't, well, this was probably gonna be over real quick.

The ravine quickly grew deeper, and the edges were now jagged and bare, even though there was thick brush growing further down the sides that totally concealed the water from sight. John threw in a little artful weaving as he made his way downhill, but still he didn't hear or see any sign of patrols. Had they pulled back since he left the ship? Been recalled to camp, maybe? He couldn't think of any reason why, unless they'd either found McKay's mystery lab or were leaving the planet...but he didn't think they were that lucky...

"Halt in the name of the Goddess!"

Oh, no way were they that lucky.

John raised his hands and fell to his knees, tried to make it look like a collapse without actually jarring his bad leg any further. The sentries approached from behind him, only the faint _chunk-chunk-chunk_ of their armor audible; clearly these ones, at least, had been taking the same badass lessons as Teal'c. He went through the little speech he'd come up with in his head before letting it loose. "Please," he said, trying to sound raspy. "I want to surrender."

"You are one of the Tau'ri spies," the guard behind him said.

"I'll tell you anything you want to know," he said. "Anything at all. I'll bow to your goddess. Just don't kill me, please."

He felt the hot end of a staff weapon hovering precariously close to the back of his head, and didn't have to fake a very hard swallow. The guard asked, "Are all the warriors of the Tau'ri so craven?"

"I'm freezing, man," John said. "I got no food left. I'll do anything you want me to."

He tried to count the hammering beats of his own heart while the staff weapon was trained on him. It seemed to be an hour before he felt the heat pull back. "Get up," the guard snapped at him. "We will take you to Master Ushtapar."

They even helped him up, if by _help_ you meant _tried to dislocate his shoulders._ John made a point of staggering and stumbling as they stripped away his weapons, and there was a moment when he thought he'd overplayed it—they gave him a push forward and he let himself go sprawling back to the ground. The growl of displeasure behind him was surely amplified by the big ugly helmets—at least, he hoped it was. "On your feet, infidel," the leader snarled. "Do not try my patience." They hauled him up by the collar of his shirt like he was made of balled-up newspapers, and this time when they shoved him he kept his feet. He did _not_ want to face a punch with that kind of strength behind it.

John walked with his hands on his head and a staff weapon at his back now, and had to keep reminding himself to limp more. He didn't have to force his left arm to droop, though—the position pulled at his stiff pectorals muscles and put more strain on his obliques than was probably good for them. He hoped they didn't mistake the gesture for a lunge at his empty holster or something, or they might shoot him before he got within a mile of the camp. They followed the edge of the ravine for a while, and then took a detour through the woods, though it was hard for John to tell in the darkness if they were actually following a trail or not. It seemed to take a lot longer than it should've before the lights of the camp became visible through the trees, especially at the pace the Jaffa set; once he did make them out, though, they rapidly grew into a pattern of tents and walls, hard edges with little attempt at camouflage. Who needed it on an uninhabited planet, with just a couple of harried and wounded enemies on the run?

When they finally crossed the tree trunks and limbs scattered almost carelessly around the perimeter, John caught sight of one of the sensors Rodney had mentioned to him—the perimeter sensors that were supposed to keep non-Lion Guards out of the camp. It flickered from red to amber for a moment as they stepped between the piles of logs, but there was no sound, no light show, no sign of any recognizable mechanical processes at all. Had it let John through because it sensed he was with a Jaffa escort, or had the guard somehow disabled it temporarily? He had no damn clue, nothing aside from Rodney's hasty explanations, and those involved phrases like _pointy sparkly thing_ and _the part that looks like a TIE fighter._ He was beginning to appreciate that he was so far out of his league he was playing a different sport altogether.

"Jaffa, kree!" somebody shouted at them, and there was a short, gutteral exchange of Goa'uld between his captors and a sentry, one that included some liberal shoving around of John. Eventually they were allowed through, and he was taken on a winding route between the huts and tents, both of which looked a hell of a lot more sturdy up close than they did from the high cliffs above. He tried to match what he was seeing to his mental overhead map—there was the mess tent, general quarters, something that he'd dubbed officer's quarters even though Rodney insisted Jaffa didn't have officers...and there, the two buildings he needed to worry about. One was barely the size of an outhouse, and didn't even lock, because what Jaffa was going to tamper with the mysteries of their gods? The other, just across a pounded-dirt plaza, had to be their center of command. It was among the largest and most sturdy, thought John had no idea what actually would be inside it; he wasn't sure if the Goa'uld even had the equivalents of the support staff that he would normally expect.

They stopped him outside the main doors and had another short conversation in Goa'uld. Whatever they said, it satisfied the guards inside, and once again John found himself being shoved forward; this time he didn't have to fake a stumble, but he kept his feet, at least until a heavy hand shoved him down. He landed hard on his right knee and struggled not to gasp, even though he was supposed to be playing lame. Just then it was a little too close to reality.

The room was large, but still didn't seem large enough to comprise the entire building. There were tables and equipment, most of it unrecognizable, about half of it dark and inactive. All the Lion Guards in the room were bowing before a figure still in his snarling-lion helmet, who looked down on John with luminous red eyes. "What is this you bring me?" he asked sonorously.

"The last of the Tau'ri spies, Master Ushtapar," John's captor said. "He wishes to surrender."

"So you bring this garbage to me instead of disposing of it in the forest?"

"Please—" John blurted, because it was looking a little too much like Rodney would have grounds for _I told you so._ He got smacked on the back of his head for his troubles, hard enough to make him see stars.

"He claims he wishes to surrender and bow before our Lady," the patrol leader clarified, and he laid out John's rifle and other gear on one of the tables just inside John's peripheral vision. "I thought it wise to seek her intercession on the matter."

The leader came closer, looming over John, and suddenly lowered his helmet; the muzzle split and retracted, the spikes of the mane folded together, and the whole thing vanished into his collar. He turned out to be a forty-something man (or at least, comparable to the human idea of forty-something) with a perfectly bald head and a scar on his jaw. In the center of his forehead was a eight-pointed star limned in solid gold. "You would betray your own people, Tau'ri?" he asked. "For what purpose?"

"So I can live," John said, putting in his Oscar bid now. "I'm out of food, I'm out of out medicine, the water from the river gave me some kind of exploding shits--" (he extemporized this, as he realized that he couldn't be out of water in these mountains--) "I'm tired, man. I mean sir. I mean I give up."

Ushtapar tilted his head from one side to another, studying John carefully, up and down. "You have lead my men on quite the hunt through the forest," he said. "You are a skilled warrior. I find it suspicious your will would so easily break."

"Well, you know, at first I was kind of pissed off at you," John said. "Since you killed my friends and all. But then I realized there wasn't any point in fighting if I was just gonna join them."

"And you wish to prostrate yourself before the Goddess?" Ushtapar asked dubiously.

"Oh, yeah," John tried to say with enthusiasm. "I mean, I been thinking about this. You guys clearly have got it all figured out in the goddess department. My goddess, what the hell's she ever done for me? Let my friends die and stranded me on this planet without any supplies. Your goddess, though, she gives you stuff. She favors you. In the goddess sweepstakes, you guys hit the jackpot. I wanna trade up."

It was either a testament to John's acting ability or, more likely, the utter inability of the Jaffa to understand fifty percent of what he was saying, but Ushtapar nodded slightly. "You came to this realization as you hid in the forest?"

John nodded. "Like I said, no food, no supplies--"

Ushtapar's hand suddenly snaked out and grabbed him by the chin, squeezing hard enough that John couldn't close his mouth. "Yet you find the time to shave your face? To wash the dirt from your fingernails?"

Shit shit shit shit _shit._ John's brain slipped a gear ever so briefly, but long enough to all but confirm his guilt. Ushtapar shoved him backwards with that Jaffa strength that left John sprawling on his back, and a hedge of staffs suddenly filled his vision. "Shall we kill him, Master?" the patrol leader asked.

"No," Ushtapar said. He took something that looked a lot like a three-pronged cattle prod off his belt, and John's stomach dropped as he realized what was going to happen next. "If he is eager to tell us something, then we should not deny him the chance. Where are your Tok'ra allies?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," John tried to say flat-out, but before he could finish the sentence Ushtapar shoved the prod into his stomach. If he'd thought it hurt to move when he first regained consciousness, he had clearly been misinformed; this was what hurt, a wave of fire that fried every nerve in his body. His vision whited out, and he tasted something hot and dry and metallic on his tongue; even after the prod had been withdrawn, it took a moment or two to make his arms and legs obey him again. He wanted to speak, but all he could say was, "Ow."

"You appeared less than a day after we shot down their ship, Tau'ri," Ushtapar said. "Obviously you were here for a rendezvous. The gods do not take such collusion lightly."

"Now, see, that's a funny coincidence," John said. "Nobody told me anything about any Tok'ra being here. Are you sure it wasn't a weather balloon?"

That got him the prod again, for maybe five seconds longer than before, which was already ten seconds too long. He wondered if it was possible to pass out from screaming, and if so, what they would do to him if he did. "We have seen the Tok'ra near the place where you were found," Ushtapar said, while John was still panting. "They have killed several of my men. If you so dearly wish to honor our Lady, you will tell me where they are, so we might make a sacrifice to her."

"I can't tell you what I don't know," John said, though he couldn't stop he voice trembling. "The Tok'ra aren't exactly Earth's best buddies, all right? For all I know they left me to hang out there because they thought I might distract you."

John figured that trash-talking the Tok'ra might be convincing, but he couldn't be sure it'd save his life. Ushtapar seemed to consider this story for several minutes. "You expect us to believe this deception was not their doing?" he finally asked, dripping scorn.

John looked him in the eyes and was completely honest. "No, sir, this deception was totally my idea."

When he recovered from the third touch of the prod, his throat was burning and his nose was bleeding freely. Ushtapar was standing over him, framed by one of the globes of light that hung from the ceiling. "Take this fool away from here for now. I will deal with him at my leisure. Perhaps with more persuasion--"

Whatever orders Ushtapar was about to give were cut off by a cry that John could've sworn came from inside a solid wall. A minute later he realized it _had_ come from inside the wall, which was clearly not solid; a young Jaffa stepped through it and bowed low. "Master Ushtapar, our Lady speaks!" he shouted. "She calls for you!"

Ushtapar straightened, and John might not have known much about Jaffa culture or psychology, but he definitely recognized a look of _oh, shit_ when he saw one, however briefly. "Bring this filth," he snapped to the patrol. "If he is so eager to serve the Goddess, we shall allow her to pass judgment upon him."

John was hauled to his feet and dragged through the invisible doorway; he felt like the aftermath of one big muscle cramp, and barely managed to keep his feet under himself. The second room of the command chamber was small and poorly lit, with what was unmistakably an altar set up at one end. It had the candles, the incense, the gratuitous bling that he associated with all things Goa'uld-related. It also had a medium-sized tele-ball thingy floating over it. This showed a woman, young, with dark skin and hair, her eyes accented not by makeup but by a thousand tiny chips of obsidian, her neck heavy with black pearls. Even if all the Jaffa hadn't fallen to their knees—and once again shoved John to his—there could've been no question that this was Inanna the System Lord. (System Lady?)

"Ushtapar, my faithful one," she said in that jarring bass. "What progress have you made?"

"O my lady, our work remains slow," he said. "We continue to search for the power source, but it confounds our instruments. Yet we persevere. I swear to you, it shall be yours or my life is forfeit."

"So you often tell me," Inanna said. She didn't exactly sound amused. "Thirty days and nights you labor, and what profit can you show? How many lives do you have to offer?"

Ushtapar swallowed visibly. "O my lady, I can report that we have captured the last of the Tau'ri spies," he said, and dragged John forward, hand heavy and sweating against the back of his neck. "This man attempted to win our confidence by falsely professing faith in you, but we were not deceived. He shall surely surrender his Tok'ra allies, even if I must tear the flesh from his bones."

Inanna cocked her head to one side. "He professed to worship me?" she asked. _Now_ she was amused all of a sudden, raising one elegant eyebrow. "Tell me more, Ushtapar."

That clearly wasn't the direction he'd planned on this conversation heading. "He...he lies, O my lady," Ushtapar said haltingly. "He claims to have lingered in the forest, wounded and destitute, yet his beard is cut and his hands are clean. Kolmec attests that he shot this man several times, yet his wounds have been healed. This can be nothing but Tok'ra trickery."

Inanna looked directly at John with black, black eyes. "Is this true, Tau'ri? Are you a pawn in the hands of your uncertain allies?"

"Well, that would explain how I got into this mess," John said. Ushtapar growled, and squeezed John's neck painfully tight.

Inanna laughed. "A clever mouth. Perhaps it could be put to better purposes than talking."

"My lady?" Ushtapar asked warily, the moment John said, "Wait, what?" Another one of the guards hit him in the head again.

"My consort requires a new host," Inanna declared. "And this one has a pleasing face. Preserve him, Ushtapar, until one of my ships can fetch him to me. If my beloved is equally pleased, you will soon learn all you wish to know."

In the grand scheme of things, John did not ever think he would ever have a tyrannical alien goddess try to claim him for her harem, nor that he might consider this a good thing. Ushtapar was starting to look distinctly ill. "O my lady, at the hands of his Tok'ra allies I have lost many men, your loyal and loving followers, and if they remain at large--"

"I have spoken," Inanna said. "Do you question me, Ushtapar?"

He seemed for just a second ready to try it, too; then he visibly deflated. "O my lady, I hear you and obey," he said. "Glory to your name."

The teleball went blank, and the Jaffa all filed out of the temple space reverently, again dragging John with them. It wasn't until the were in the main room of the command building that the patrol leader asked, "Your new orders, Master Ushtapar?"

"Yeah," John said, still a little punch-drunk. "How're you gonna preserve me?"

Ushtapar looked down at him, and then suddenly kicked John in the stomach. His world exploded in pain, not the penetrating fire of the cattle prod thing, but almost as bad; he briefly forgot how to breathe. "Our Lady orders only that we preserve his life, and expressed joy only in his face," he said slowly. "All other parts are ours, and if he will not grant us vengeance against the Tok'ra, he shall stand in their stead." He gave another order in Goa'uld, and John was dragged to his feet yet again, and led out into the cold, dark night.


	11. Chapter 11

They took John to a tent on the edge of the camp, one of the places whose purpose they hadn't been able to guess from their remote observations. Inside it was empty except for a metal ring sunk deep in the ground, and one of John's captors produced a metal contraption that looked like nothing so much as an old U-shaped bike lock. They twisted his arms behind him, clamped the lock around his wrists, and then somehow hooked it into the ring, leaving John kneeling on a floor made of bare dirt studded with dead grass. "We will return for you," one of the guards declared, and then John was alone.

He spent a few minutes just trying to clear his head. It seemed obvious once he'd had a few moments to concentrate on something other than his aching body—a body that was so not up this kind of punishment, not after a month spent mostly on his back—it seemed obvious that Ushtapar was going to rally the troops somehow, to make his vengeance that much sweeter. Perhaps he'd do it right away, or perhaps he'd wait until the usual shift change near dawn—some of the patrols were a long way off. Inanna was clearly pissed off at the lack of progress, and nothing raises troop moral like a round of recreational torture, right?

In one way, John was right on target—he'd surrendered and been imprisoned rather than executed outright. He'd just called a full muster and attracted one of Inanna's motherships in the process. No pressure, right?

_Focus, John,_ he told himself. _You're right where you wanted to be. Now it's time to play Houdini._

He tested the U-lock as best he could, and found it actually had some give in it where the flat bar ground against the bones of his wrist; but at the awkward angles involved, he couldn't get any leverage on it. Still, if he could wiggle the bar just by bending his wrists the right way, that had to be something, right? He also tried tugging on the ring, but that seemed to be pretty firmly anchored into place, so there was no chance of wiggling his arms into a better pose. His current position meant he couldn't even kneel upright without wrenching his shoulders (he tried) so there was no way he could get his legs under him, either.

Even in the best of health, it was an impossible situation to bust out of; right there, right then, John was really, really tired. And sore. And pretty much feeling like an idiot. Rodney was waiting for him by now, and John was going to let him down. If he didn't get out of here and do his thing with the generator, Rodney was going to be waiting in the forest all night, a sitting duck for the patrols. Rodney was going to be stranded on this planet with no food or heat. Rodney was eventually going to get caught. Rodney was going to get killed.

And he shouldn't have been thinking of it like that. It shouldn't be all about Rodney. It should be about himself, his mission, the rest of SG-4. He shouldn't be thinking about something he couldn't have and people he was going to leave behind. It all came down to him in the end, not Rodney or Tanys or Kharoush...

Wait. Kharoush.

John lifted his head and gave the U-lock another rattle. The Jaffa obviously had no clue about Kharoush, or they wouldn't have assumed there was more than one other Tok'ra running around the planet. So what if John couldn't break the lock by himself? He couldn't bench-press a tree, either. All he needed was for Kharoush to wake up and help him. Not even wake all the way up. Just a hint, a kick, one of those little moments that made Rodney so excited all the time...

(Rodney...)

"C'mon, buddy," John whispered. "You've been slacking off for like a month. What's the point of having super powers if you're just gonna lay around like that? You're lazy, man."

The tent stayed silent and still, dark but for the indirect light that filtered through the walls. Occasionally a shadow moved across the scene—he assumed they were patrols, since he didn't recall this stretch of the camp getting much traffic otherwise. More importantly, there was no change inside John's head, no sudden blossoming awareness, no new thoughts alongside his own. Just a mean headache and the feeling of being kinda ridiculous. "Rodney's waiting on us," John tried. "Tanys is waiting on us. You gonna let your girlfriend...mate...thingy, you gonna let the two of them get killed? I barely know them and I don't want them to get killed."

Nothing, but a burr in John's own throat, which he swallowed around. "I really, really don't want them to get killed," he admitted. "So you gotta step up your game here, Kharoush."

He tried the lock again, straining, but the bar would only slide so far and no further. He fought down the urge to swear out loud, because if he drew the guards' attention he'd lose his chance to escape. "God damn it, you dumb snake, I..." _need you,_ he could've finished, but he couldn't say that even when no one was around to hear, not out loud; _I need you, I need your help, because I can't do this by myself and Rodney is waiting on me and Tanys trusted me;_ he needed to do this because it all came down to getting out alive, to getting everyone out alive, and he might've let down everyone else ever but he wasn't, was _not_ going to fail Rodney, not now.

He pictured Rodney's face in his mind's eye, the flying hands, the stupid lopsided smile. He strained against the lock again.

It gave way with a tremendous _snap!_

John just crouched there for a second, breathing hard, not entirely sure what had just happened. He carefully extricated his hands from the broken lock, and just as carefully climbed to his feet to check the damage. His wrists were already starting to bruise, deep and dark; the back of his head was sore, but there was no lump; his abdominals ached in the bad way, but nothing was bleeding again. He felt shaky and exhausted, and his arms still trembled, from strain and the brief surge of strength that was already fading.

In one sense, John now realized, he was kind of fucked. But at least the plan was back on track.

He walked the perimeter of the tent, thinking about the camp layout. Obviously leaving through the front flap would be a ridiculous idea, but the back was under watch, too, albeit less often. He chose one side—the darker one, not that it really mattered much—and ran his hands along the seam between the dirt floor and the material that wasn't quite canvas and wasn't quite plastic and wasn't quite anything else either. Near the edges the dirt hadn't been packed hard, and whatever they'd used to seal down the edges of the tent, it was something John could break with purely human hands.

He dug and pulled and made just enough space to crawl through, between the dirt and the tent wall. He slithered out on his belly and lay perfectly flat and still in the narrow alley between that tent and another, watching a patrol come...and go. John moved to the far edge of the camp, where the patrols were less frequent, and started moving from the shadow of one building to the next, crouching low and holding his breath every time he heard that soft _chunk-chunk_ of armor.

He started to think maybe Rodney was right about these guys having a low IQ. Most of the patrols were precise as razors, going about their business like they were on a track—two guards _chunk-chunk_ their way by, looking neither right nor left, ten minutes pass, another pair appears. (They even walked in step, for Christ's sake.) He didn't want to get complacent, though, because he knew that for every robot there might be another one as smart as Ushtapar, one who was going to notice a foot sticking out or hear the sound of him breathing. Hell, any minute now they might notice that he'd slipped the tent. And there was always the chance of somebody not on a formal patrol looking the wrong way at the wrong moment...he dove to his belly as just such a person passed the shadow he was hiding in, but they were all at ease in their own camp, all thinking other thoughts. If the outlying patrols were being recalled, they weren't in any kind of hurry about it. One thing going for them so far.

He made it to the center of the camp, and then he was stuck: there was about five yards of hard bare dirt between the command building and the generator building and he was on the wrong side of it. Lights still seeped around the edges of the command building doors, and John could see movement—perhaps Ushtapar chewing somebody out for not finding the hidden lab faster, or perhaps he was making arrangements for John's public humiliation. Either way, John didn't have much of a choice but to take the space at a sprint and hope like hell he wasn't seen or heard. This time there was nothing Kharoush or any other alien intervention could do to help him.

He waited as long as he dared to get a feel for the patrols, waited for the shadows around the seams of the command building to be particularly animated, and then bolted for it. _One two three four five--_

The door of the generator building stuck, and for one hideous moment John thought it was locked, but then something creaked and popped and he was inside. He didn't have time to wait and see whether anybody had noticed him enter or not. He turned to face the generator, and for once he had something going exactly to plan—it was just as Rodney had described to him when he explained to John what had to be done.

_It'll have a dome on the top—flip that up but don't touch anything._ John flipped up the dome with some difficulty and studied the pattern of crystal rods and knobs underneath for a moment. It of course meant nothing to him, but Rodney had been specific about each step in the process and it couldn't hurt to plan ahead. _Instead, go down the front of the thing—you'll be able to tell what's the front—and find the third tray from the top. Slide that open to the right._

It was actually not at all intuitive about which face of the generator was the front—it was a hexagon—and the trays were almost impossible to see from the outside, so John ended up opening them all in order to count properly. _There should be three blue crystals in a row inside that tray, and you need to remove the one furthest from you and set it aside._ Okay, not actually blue, more like purple, but they were the only ones that had the same color three in a row. _Take any of the orange crystals from the other side of this tray and move it to the empty slot._

Someone knocked on the door of the generator hut. "Jaffa, kree!"

_Close that tray and go to the next one down. This is very important. Take the first crystal on the right--_

"Who is in there? Identify yourself!"

_\--at this point you can eat it if you really want, but you need to find a crystal under the dome in the outermost ring that's the same shape and color. There should only be one. Put that into the slot you just emptied._

There were a lot of crystals under that dome, though, and some had a hexagonal profile, some octagonal, some odd numbers that he couldn't remember the special names for. The pounding on the door started to get loud, and John didn't have anything to jam it with. He grabbed the first crystal of the right color without checking the shape too closely and jammed it into place.

"Identify yourself!"

_Now, you should see a panel near the top start displaying some numbers in Goa'uld. You can read the numbers by now, can't you? I should hope so. There will be a string of about four, and you need to start taking crystals out from under the dome—the second ring from the outside—until that string of numbers is all zeros. You can start pretty much anywhere._

John ripped out two or three crystals at a time, and the numbers shifted wildly. At one point he thought there were six of them. They all zeroed out as he heard the doors open behind him, and as he slammed that one blue-purple crystal into one of the empty slots he felt the hot node of a staff weapon on his shoulders, and then he was being dragged backwards out of the generator hut, out into the air, back before Ushtapar.

"Tok'ra," he sneered, standing over John, dramatically framed in the open doorway of the generator building. "Your death will be slow."

"Yours won't," John said, counting down in his head, because Rodney had warned him _if you don't turn all the dials on the rim all the way to the left, you'll have about five seconds before—_

With a tremendous crack, the generator exploded.

He managed to duck and cover his head the moment before the burst of flame. Ushtapar wasn't so lucky; or, rather, he had the bad luck to be standing right between John and the open door, which meant John had a human shield against the fire and shrapnel. Rodney had warned him there would be a secondary explosion, too, but the Jaffa evidently didn't have a clue, because those not knocked to the ground by the first one started running towards the burning generator and their fallen comrades in a confused mob. The second blast sent most of them to the ground as well.

That was John's opportunity to run, and run he did, hell for leather, back to the crude wooden palisade. There was enough confusion that nobody seemed to notice him, or at least, not before something else grabbed their attention. He took a pile of wood at a run, clambering atop the unsteady stack of logs to get to one of the perimeter alarms, any of them. _They run on their own batteries, but they're interlinked,_ Rodney had warned him. _Take down one and you'll crash the whole network._

He'd also explained how to disable one discreetly, but given the circumstances, John felt really justified in just pounding the damn thing with a piece of wood until the light went off.

He dropped back into the shadow of the logs and waited. And waited. Rodney was supposed to head for this point the moment he saw the generator fail—or, in this case, explode—so that John could let him through the perimeter. Rodney was supposed to be waiting for him, not the other way around. Stupid, crazy thoughts started to swirl in John's head, images of Rodney being caught, Rodney being killed, Rodney falling down the ravine and splattering his big ol' brain on some rocks, a wound not even Tanys could save him from. John was being paranoid and he knew it, but every minute he waited was a minute that Rodney had been held up by something, and a minute when one of the guards could come running up the same path he had taken shouting—

"Kree! _Kree!"_

John tried to conceal himself in the heap of wood, but the long branches had mostly been lopped off already, leaving behind nothing but splintery stumps or dense thickets that tore at his skin and clothes. Three guards were marking their way towards him at a dead run, and the moment they paused long enough to actually aim those staffs he was dead, he was done for, this was it—

The hair on the back of his neck stood up, and a moment later three bright flashes lit up the night, along with a very distinct _beep-beep-whoosh._ The guards fell unconscious to the ground. "Your timing sucks, McKay," John said shakily, turning around.

"So does yours," Rodney shot back, sounding just as rattled. He had John's jacked zipped to the chin, and for a minute John thought he'd engaged in some very unorthodox war painting; then he realize it was plain old mud that stained Rodney's pants past the knee and smeared half his face. "I expected your signal like half an hour ago," he said as they made a run for the landing strip, "and I did not expect it to be fire."

"Things got complicated," John said. "A System Lady said I had a pretty mouth."

"What?" Rodney yelped, then covered his own mouth. "I'm not gonna ask. Just...you look like shit."

"Same to you," John said.

"Well, I had to climb down the ravine to wait for you."

"They didn't buy that I wanted to defect."

"Told you it was a bad plan."

"Yours was worse."

They dove into the shadow of one of the gliders as another group of guards raced past; John tried to put himself between Rodney and the danger, out of force of habit, only to realize that Rodney was trying to do the same thing. They ended up in a tangle of arms while the guards went past, John breathing heavily against Rodney's shoulder, Rodney's stubble scratching at his temple. For a moment neither of them dared move.

Well after the guards were past, Rodney said quietly, "I'm really glad you're not dead."

"Same to you," John said, and disentangled himself, because this wasn't the time or place to even begin to _think_ about anything but the plan. "You brought both the zats, right?"

"No, I thought I'd just make this even more unlikely to succeed," he grumbled, and pressed one of the slim guns into John's hand.

They were able to go around behind the gliders and get into one of the cargo ships, and in the nick of time; as the doors shut, John saw a whole wave of Jaffa racing towards the airstrip. "We got incoming. How do you lock these doors?"

"They're not coming here, they're heading for the gliders," Rodney said. "Probably getting into the air to start searching for you. Us. Help me move these."

They had to shift some boxes to get at the engine on the ship, and when John dropped one he discovered it was full of his old friends, the pouches of protein mush. He started stuffing the backpack with them. "Hey, hey, hey!" Rodney said, looking over his shoulders. "I thought we had a very specific plan here?"

"We can still fit a lot of shit in here," he said. The door to the engine room opened, and this was apparently what they were supposed to look like—a softly glowing engine core that hummed and pulsed slightly, cylinders sliding up and down in complex patterns. At least until Rodney started hitting buttons, at which point everything went dark and still. When it was fully powered down, he went after the flux coil thingy. "Can I get sensors up from here?" John asked him.

"Did we not have this conversation already?" Rodney asked. "Don't touch anything that might put the ship into lockdown." He hauled out the coil and stuffed it into the backpack, rearranging protein packets to make room.

John went into the cockpit anyway, rather than drawing attention by opening the exterior doors over and over. The gliders had all taken off, but they weren't coming for the cargo ships—and why would they, when they were basically flying warehouses? The fire sparked by the exploding generator looked like it was almost out, too, but since any sane person would've already run for it, John hoped Ushtapar (or whoever was now in charge) had sent most of his men out on the search already.

Which would mean that they had a line of pissed-off Jaffa between them and their own ship, but John figured they could cross that bridge when they came to it.

"A little help back here?" Rodney called, and John heard more boxes crash to the ground. "There are a couple more parts I could use if we're going to actually be able to find where we're going--"

John turned away from the windows, because they weren't going to get another chance to shop for spares if something else came up and it had been his idea to make a wish list in the first place. He turned away, but them something caught his eyes, a faint red flicker off in the distance, almost lost against the lights of the fire and the camp. Red, then amber, and red again.

"We gotta go, Rodney," he called, rushing back into the cargo hold.

Rodney looked up from the panel he'd been rooting around in. "What? Why?"

"They got the perimeter alarms back up," John told him.

"Oh, no no no no." Rodney didn't ask how John knew; he just shoved what looked like a random selection of crystals into the backpack and zipped it up. "That's bad. That's very bad."

"How do we get by them?" John asked.

"We don't," Rodney said. "We go through them."

"I thought you said we're get electrocuted if we--"

"I will explain the specifics when we are not about to die!"

They slipped out of the cargo ship and raced around the back, now that there was no longer a screen of gliders to provide any cover. The wooden palisades were just yards from where the ship was parked, and John could clearly see the perimeter devices blinking amber and red. "They working or not?"

"They're about to come online," Rodney said. "How fast can you run right now?"

"As fast you need me to," John said.

"Seriously, Sheppard," Rodney said, glaring at him. "How fast?"

John's whole body ached, some parts worse than others, and he was teetering on the edge of exhaustion. "What do you need me to do?"

"Run flat-out all the way back to the ship."

"Just that?" he asked. "Hell, I'll beat you there, if that's the case."

Rodney rolled his eyes and opened his zat. "Get ready to start running, because this is going to be loud."

For a split second John saw his eyes flash, and Tanys aimed the zat and fired. One of those winking perimeter alarms suddenly exploded into a cloud of sparks and smoke. "Go!" Tanys bellowed, and John went, sprinting hard for the now-open gap between the logs.

Before he'd taken two steps, alarms began to howl all over the camp. So that was why they hadn't tried it this way the first time.

Rodney stayed neck-and-neck with him as they cleared the trees, surprisingly, but once they entered the woods John managed to pull ahead slightly, if only for his pride. (And only slightly, for the sake of his leg.) They had to circle around one side of the camp to get back to the river, but they could more or less follow that up the valley back to their ship. Of course, the Jaffa were probably taking more or less the same route, so there would be a shit-ton of them between here and home, so maybe a direct route wasn't such a good idea. He started to call over, "I think we should--"

A staff blast caused part of a tree to dissolve behind him. Tanys grabbed his arm and pulled him sharply in the other direction. "This way!" he called. "We must cross the ridge."

John couldn't immediately remember what was on the other side of that ridge to the east of the gate, only that it was high and sharp—not as high as the ridge that formed the western side of the valley, but close to it. "That's gonna take all night," he panted.

"Trust me!" Tanys said, suddenly veering down a steep drop-off. John scrambled to catch up as another staff blast came uncomfortably close.

The drop lead into another of those shallow cave mouths, like the one Rodney had booby-trapped. Except this one wasn't so shallow; there was a narrow passage at on end, almost impossible to see until you were right on top of it, and it opened out into a fairly passable tunnel. "This comes out on the other side of the ridge?" John whispered.

"The whole ridge is full of them," Tanys said, as he stopped and knelt at that little passage. "They are too numerous and too smooth to be entirely natural, and we have explored them extensively while searching for evidence of a lab."

"Maybe this is the lab," John said. "What's left of it."

Tanys stood. "Perhaps. That charge will detonate in a minute and a half or the next time someone steps on it."

_"Shit!"_ They hurried down the tunnel, and around another corner, putting the heavy rock between them and the charge. "You just happen to carrying around all these explosives?"

"They are useful. I thought we might have time to sabotage their gliders." Tanys' eyes flashed, and Rodney added, "Also, she likes blowing things up. A _lot."_

"There is no problem that can't be solved with a suitable application of high explosives," John said. Rodney made a frustrated noise, but they both froze when they heard (and felt) the charge go off behind him, far too loud in the closed space. "That could've caused a cave-in," John whispered.

"It was meant to cause a cave-in," Rodney said. "With any luck, they'll lose us in the cave system. They don't seem to have connected the dispersed energy signature with an underground installation, at least not yet, so they haven't been searching any of the caves very thoroughly."

"Well, if you keep dropping big rocks on them every time they try..."

The caves were silent and dark, except for John's flashlight and a smaller lantern crystal that Rodney pinned to his shoulder. They were also freezing cold, but John tried his best to ignore his own shivering and concentrate on following Rodney's lead. They passed suggestions of fantastic underground lakes, galleries of raw crystal, twisted stalactites and other subterranean wonders, which were utterly spoiled by the fear that they could come face to face with more Lion Guard any minute. At least twice Rodney was overwhelmed with paranoia because of the deceptive echoes of their own footsteps and heavy breathing. John had to admit he wasn't feeling much better.

Their overall path climbed, though, and after a few tight spots ("Did I mention I'm claustrophobic?") John saw green-white moonlight through a crack up ahead. "Where does this come out?"

"Canyon wall," Rodney said. "Bare rock for the most part. Not a lot of cover, but we won't leave any trail for them to pick up even if they have made it this far."

John went to check his watch, but realized the Jaffa had taken it along with his weapons. He was just going to have to take Rodney's word for it. "Then what? Up and over?"

"Yeah, we should be able to cross to that ridge we were using for observation," Rodney said. "Assuming they haven't found the ship yet, which they shouldn't have, unless of course they've walked right into it..."

The crack really was a crack—they had to squeeze through and then pass the backpack separately, and John now understood why Rodney had been coming back with so many cuts and scrapes. It wasn't quite the steep drop-off Rodney had made it sound like, but it was definitely on the dry side of these mountains and rough enough that there was almost no vegetation to hide them; the few scraggly trees that managed to cling to the rocks laid down deep back shadows that forked under the light of the two little moons. "I don't like this," John said. "For the record and all."

"Well, what are we gonna do, go back?" Rodney asked.

From well below them, a staff blast smashed into the raw stone.

John took off running, grabbing Rodney's wrist and dragging him away. So there were Jaffa on this side of the ridge as well—okay—cool. That just meant they had to get out of sight as fast as they could. Preferably before John's legs gave out. "Where's the nearest cover?" he asked.

"There isn't any!" Rodney said. "I didn't think they'd catch up to us this fast!"

Another staff blast went wide of them, but not wide enough by John's standards. These weren't random potshots, these were aimed; somebody below had a real good look at them, and staff weapons weren't exactly hampered by gravity when firing uphill the way a bullet was. John kept running uphill anyway, hoping for a fold in the mountainside or a tree or something to crop up that they could hide behind. His lungs and legs were starting to burn, though, and despite his best efforts Rodney was starting to pull ahead of him, just a bit, on his right.

The ground at John's heels exploded into chips of gravel that stung his legs and ass. Rodney turned around to look. "Keep going!" John tried to say between gasps.

"Are you--" Rodney started to ask, and then another blast hit the ground in front of him, and he was crashing to the hard, bare ground with a squawk.

John cursed and doubled back to grab him. "Come on, come on, come on," he chanted mindlessly as he tried to pull him upright.

Rodney's eyes flashed. "Keep going," Tanys said. "My ankle is broken."

"Not real good at leaving people behind," John said, pulling an arm over his shoulders. He pushed up and nearly fell himself, pain lancing through his bad leg. "Damn it, damn it!"

"Take the bag and go," Tanys said. "Kharoush can mend the ship when he awakes."

"Kharoush is on my shit list right now, and so are you," John said. "Just get your ass up this hill!"

"You are being unreasonable!"

"Have you met me?"

There was an angle of shadow up ahead, just a stripe, but John had to believe it would be enough to hide them at least temporarily. The angle of those shots meant it had to hide them, this sudden bow in the side of the ridge. Tanys was heavy against his arm, not even trying to put weight on his left leg, instead leaving John's right to bear both their weight, and this was the fucking stupidest three-legged race ever—another staff shot flashed inches from their faces, hot enough to singe eyebrows—almost there--

Tanys' one good foot slipped as they made it to the imagined safety of that shadow, and he crashed against John with a whimper. John felt himself tilting towards the steep edge of the slope and threw his weight the other way, towards the side of the mountain, but after a night of abuse his right leg gavev way under him. They both threw out arms to try to catch themselves before they went sliding all the way down, and John had one moment to register that the rocks under his palm felt strange, smooth, not at all like the weathered mountain side.

And then they fell through stone and into darkness.


	12. Chapter 12

John managed to twist so he didn't actually land on top of Rodney, but there was a moment of confusion after that when he was afraid to move at all. They were lying in a dark passage, the cool air so dry that he could practically feel the inside of his nose and mouth start to crisp. At his feet, he saw the outline of a doorway, not quite a square, and through it the moons and the stars and the mountainside. But there hadn't been a doorway on the other side of the doorway, a sentence that stopped making sense as soon as he thought of it, and he was still looking at it stupidly when Rodney, grunting, pushed himself up on one knee and pressed his hand flat against something next to the doorway.

The doors slid shut, and they were mired in real darkness. "Oh, my god," was all Rodney said for a minute, voice trembling.

John sat up in the velvety blackness and reached out for Rodney, or at least reached in the direction he'd just been, and caught the edge of a sleeve. "Where the hell are we, McKay?" he asked.

"We're in the lab," he said weakly; sound and movement and some kind of intuition told John that, broken ankle or not, Rodney was crawling away from the door and into the darkness. "We found the damn lab. Oh, my _god."_

"Your Ancient lab?" John asked, climbing to his feet. He tried to avoid touching the walls, but his bad leg wobbled and he had no choice. The moment he did, he felt the thrill of Ancient technology through his fingertips, and the lights in the corridor switched on, revealing a long passage of silvery panels.

Rodney froze in mid-crawl, rolled over onto his butt, and glared at John. John pulled his hand away from the wall guiltily. "What the hell was that?" Rodney asked, almost accusing.

"Accident?" John asked.

"You've got the gene, don't you?" Rodney asked, pointing a finger. "I've spent a month looking for Ancient technology and you don't see fit to tell me you've got the gene?"

"You said you didn't need it," John said, stuffing his hands in his pockets. "How's the ankle?"

Rodney grimaced and tugged on his muddy pants. "Bad. Tanys can heal it, though. Now help me up so I can get a look at this place."

"Not until we get you a splint or something," John said. "No point in making Tanys do any extra work." Rodney rolled his eyes, but let John remove his boot and sock, to reveal an ankle that was already swelling. He would've made splint, except there wasn't anything handy to splint it with, so he just wrapped it with the improvised bandages from under his own shirt and then tightened the laces on the boot until Rodney squeaked. "Now how do we get out of here?"

"Get out?" Rodney echoed. "What are you talking about, get out? This is what I've been looking for all this time—this is—it's—we can't get out now!"

"This mountain is swarming with Jaffa," John reminded him. "We need to get back to the ship before they find it."

"The ship will be fine," Rodney said. "And if I couldn't get in here without the ATA gene—and I'm not forgiving you for that just yet, so don't get any ideas—if I couldn't get in here, I seriously doubt the Lion Guard will without blowing up half the mountain."

"You don't want to give them any ideas," John said.

Rodney levered himself up and tested the broken ankle, limping a few steps further from the door. Then he looked over his shoulder. "Well? Are you coming?"

John hung back. "Do we really have time to go exploring?" he asked.

"No, but we need time to rest up or both of us are going to fall down the damn mountain," Rodney said. "I certainly can't run on this leg, and since we've got a safe place to rest for a couple of hours, why shouldn't we use the time wisely?"

"You mean you use the time," John said. "This isn't my mission."

Rodney blinked at him, and his face fell for a moment before he turned it away. "Well, it's not like I'm going to get very far without your help," he said gruffly. "In both literal and metaphorical senses. Now come on, I don't think you got all the lights."

John sighed, but it wasn't like he had a lot of choice except to follow him.

They found a couple of rooms that were empty or partly empty; one even had what looked like a bedroom set, which Rodney huffed at before trying the next door. The lights came up for John wherever they went, but Rodney didn't even stop to say thanks, just barreled on forward as fast as his ankle could bear him. "There has to be a central control room somewhere," he said after the first few misses. "The individual labs would've been mostly autonomous, but as far as total operations for a facility this complex they'd need something centrally located...not to mention a hell of a lot of power. I mean, something's been keeping the air fresh in here for like ten thousand years. Do you know what humans were doing ten thousand years ago? Not to mention the Goa'uld?"

"Pretty sure it involved stone knives and bearskins," John said.

"And if I can get to the central control room I can find—oh ho." The corridor ended in double doors, with stripes of Ancient text along both sides. "Paydirt. C'mere, it might need the gene."

It didn't, but the room inside—tables etched with screens and buttons, wall panels with knobs and protrusions of indeterminate purpose—did; without being asked, John went from station to station, tapping his fingers against different keys to bring them to life. Rodney attached himself to the nearest work station and started typing away, as if he understood every word of the squiggles on the screen.

John finished his circuit of the room and sat down in a corner where he could stretch his leg out. Maybe he could even take a little nap now that his work here was done.

"Come take a look at this," Rodney said.

He massaged his calf gently. "No thanks."

"What do you mean, no thanks?" Rodney looked actually indignant. "This could be the biggest development in the history of the Tok'ra and you don't want to see?"

"I don't read Ancient," John muttered.

"Oh. Well, I can just translate." Rodney cleared his throat.

"McKay," John said. "Just because I can use the stuff doesn't mean I like it or anything."

"Well, excuse me for tapping into your personal neuroses," Rodney said snippily. "After all that ranting about me being more open with you, I thought you might like to know what all this...what I've been working for. What the point was."

He actually looked hurt by John's lack of interest, which was new. John rubbed his face, reminding himself that this wasn't the SGC, and Rodney wasn't just any geek out to use him. "All right, lay it on me," he said.

"It's a genetics lab," Rodney said. "The Ancients, they did all kind of experiments in genetic engineering—trying to make themselves Ascend faster, among other things—but the point is, they knew more about it than the Tok'ra and the Goa'uld combined, and they had methods...technology..." He waved his hands in large, meaningless patterns. "You know, actually, a geneticist could probably explain this better."

"Why do the Tok'ra care about genetic engineering?" John asked. "You gonna grow yourselves something to fight the Goa'uld with?"

"Well, you do realize that symbiotes have a genetic memory," Rodney said. "All the Tok'ra are descended from a single queen who said 'Hmmm, no' to Ra about five thousand years ago, which is why we're not, you know, evil. The Goa'uld aren't so lucky, and if we ever want to reform them instead of having to kill every single one..."

"You mean you think you can change their genetic memory?" John asked. "Make them like Tok'ra?"

"Maybe," Rodney said. "Or at the very least, make them less...you know. And anyway, that's not all we could do with it."

"What else?" John asked.

Rodney went still for a moment, poking and prodding the computer. It was Tanys who said, "The Tok'ra do not currently have a fertile queen among our number. The technology in this laboratory...gives us hope."

"Hope?" John echoed. "You mean baby symbiotes?" Tanys nodded, without looking up from the screens. John cleared his throat. "I hate to break it to you, buddy, but you're kind of short on hosts as it is."

"Our race is a dying one," Tanys said, and now he looked up, eyes flashing with emotion. "Our culture, our memories, our peaceful philosophy...it will all fade away. It is a basic desire of all life forms to reproduce, is is not? To survive as more than artifacts and names?"

"I guess," John said. He'd never been actively opposed to kids, at least in the abstract, he'd just never been able to picture himself as a father—despite all of Nancy's significant looks, all her pointed comments, all her tears. To hear that kind of wistful talk from an alien was more than a little disorienting. Then again, he supposed if he was the last of his species, he might have a little different perspective on the matter.

Rodney cleared his throat. "Anyway, that's all purely hypothetical right now. It'll be years before...and that's even assuming we get off this planet alive, first of all, and secondly that the SGC is willing to cooperate on this with us without eight hundred years of negotiations..."

"It always seemed to me like it was the Tok'ra who held things up," John said.

"That is malicious slander," Rodney said. "They're the ones who don't trust us to look out for their best interests when they're playing with matches or spaceships or whatever."

"Guess we're just independent like that," John said. "Didn't you used to work for the SGC?"

"Yes, and look where it got me," Rodney said with a sharp gesture at his neck.

He went back to work in silence, or near-silence, since he couldn't seem to go five minutes without grunting or giggling or muttering to himself. John went back to stretching out his aching muscles, and eventually found a not-entirely-uncomfortable spot against the wall to try to catch some sleep. Even a few minutes was better than nothing, and it wasn't as if he could contribute much of anything, unless Rodney needed something else initialized...

He awoke when Rodney suddenly flopped down on the floor next to him with two of the protein pouches. "This place is amazing," he said, without any preamble. "And this is going to be absolutely disgusting with cold water, but unless you see a sink..."

"Thanks," John said. The mush was gritty from not being mixed hot, but if he ignored the taste (or lack thereof) it was no worse than the Chicken Fajita MRE.

Rodney shoved a loaded spoon of the stuff into his mouth and then spend several minutes trying to swallow it properly, but when he was done he asked, apropos of nothing, "So is possible to requisition people?"

"Excuse me?" John asked.

"I was just thinking, you know, you're not an idiot," he said. "In fact, you're actually, uh, actually pretty...nice. And it just occurred to me that since you've already got the gene and we've already got, you know, a working relationship here, that maybe once we get this site opened up properly for exploration, I could maybe ask the SGC to, uh, to loan you out. If you'd be into that." He suddenly found something very interesting in his protein mush, while John tried to figure out how to respond to this. "Not that I don't think you've got better things to do, you know, monsters to kill, pretty women in short skirts to save or something like that, but we're going to need gene-carriers to make all this work and you're really...that is to say, I do...appreciate you. As a person. On a purely professional level. But also on an unprofessional level. I mean I...value your companionship. Which I realize makes me sound like an octogenarian writing a personal ad, so maybe I should just start over from the beginning--"

"Rodney," John said, before it could get any worse. "I get what you're saying."

"You do?" he said, blinking. "I mean, of course you do. Um."

"And..." John started to say, but it was the most fucked-up thing he might ever say, and it got stalled in the back of his throat. What he ended up saying was, "What about Kharoush?"

"Well, I'm sure the council will find him a real host soon," Rodney said, with a little frown. "Or did you mean if he doesn't regain consciousness by the time we get back?"

"I mean, hasn't he been seeing Tanys for like a thousand years?"

"Oh—_oh."_ Rodney suddenly looked away. "Yeah. I suppose that makes things...complicated."

John looked at his hunched shoulders, his big eyes, and it suddenly occurred to him what Rodney had really been asking. What he'd been saying, and what he hadn't said at all. "You did save my life and all," John said awkwardly, bumping his knee against Rodney's thigh. "Be kind of a jerk if I didn't try to make it up to you."

"Well, at this point I'm pretty sure we've started taking turns," Rodney said, but he'd puffed up ever so slightly.

John caught himself smiling a little. "So all we got to do now is survive, right?"

At that moment, alarms began going off all over the base.

Rodney leapt to his feet, and John could see that he was already moving around better on the ankle even if it wasn't totally healed. John got up after him, stretching a stiff but functional leg. "Please tell me that does not mean what I think it means," he asked.

"Sorry," Rodney said, pressing keys. "It looks like the Lion Guard found the door we entered through."

"The invisible door?"

"Hey, even a broken watch is right twice a day." He somehow managed to bring up an external camera, one showing the slope down which they had so very recently nearly fallen. A squad of Jaffa were setting up one of those enormous cannons of theirs a little way down the slope, pointing up. "Oh, no no no. This is very, very bad."

"Can they blow their way through that door?" John asked, then got his answer when the cannon on the screen fired; the camera winked out, and the concussion of it was audible all the way down the hallway. "Never mind. Is there another way out?"

"We can't leave now," Rodney said.

"We can't stay here!"

"They'll destroy this place!" Rodney's fingers flew over the screen, bringing up what looked like maps, or actually schematics—floor plans of this place, of at least six floors sprawling through the mountain like dry rot. "They might not have any idea what it is or what it means, but if they get in here they'll smash apart anything they don't think is worth stealing and report it to Inanna. We'll lose this place forever."

"The two of us cannot hold this entire place against all those Jaffa," John said. "I don't care what tricks you've got up your sleeve."

"Just give me a minute--"

The boom of the cannon came again. "We don't have a minute!" John said.

"We can't lose this, John!" Rodney said desperately. "It's the only chance the Tok'ra have of every being anything but an army!"

John grit his teeth. "I really am sorry," he said. "But we need to go." Rodney shook his head and looked down at the schematics again; John grabbed his wrist. "Rodney--"

"I'm thinking!"

"There's no time!"

Rodney suddenly stabbed at one of the floor plans. "This room. This is the power source. This is what they're after. If we take that with us, they might leave the lab alone."

"And chase us instead," John said. "I don't think either of us are up for running right now."

Rodney shook his head. "No, see? There's another exit in the river valley—god, I was right on top of these things the whole time and went right by them! If we exit here, it's five, maybe ten minutes to the ship."

"How fast can you get it working again?" John asked.

"Please, I'm a genius." Rodney pressed a few buttons that made the floorplans coalesce into a three-dimensional diagram. "Okay, here's where the power source is, relative to us. I can buy us some time by locking down all the doors between the Jaffa and this room, meaning we need to head...that way."

He pointed just as another concussion rocked the base; this time the lights flickered, too. "This better not take too long," John said, running for the doors.

There were stairs, and more stairs, and gently curving galleries of soft blue and silver light, and explosions; Rodney got turned around twice before they found the room with the power core in it, and had the nerve to suggest it was John who was bad with directions. The room was small, with a squat metal cylinder in the center, and protruding from the center of the cylinder was a disc of luminous golden-orange crystal. "Is that what we're looking for?" John asked.

"Just give me a minute, will you?" Rodney growled. He prodded at a computer station on the side of the cylinder, then rolled his eyes. "Of course. Midas touch, if you would?"

"You don't know the half of it, buddy," John muttered, as he prodded the computer to life.

Once it was initialized, it took about thirty seconds of furious typing for Rodney to declare "Done!" and pull the orange crystal out of its cradle. It was big and jagged and still glowing, even when all the lights of the base went dark. "There. The whole place has done into an automatic shutdown mode that should deadlock all the entrances. Which won't mean a great terribly much if they keep trying to shoot holes in them, but it'll buy us time—I can manually open the rest of the doors and I seriously doubt they know how. This thing," he shoved the heavy crystal at John, "is probably one of the most important scientific discoveries of the past ten thousand years, so don't break it."

"Can't we put it in the backpack?" John asked. It was large and awkward to carry, and strangely warm to the touch, like it was alive or something.

"No room," Rodney said. "And remember, if the Jaffa get hold of it Inanna might well become the most powerful of the System Lords and conquer the galaxy, et cetera et cetera."

Rodney really did have to manually force every door, which gave John time to ask, "What's so special about it, anyway? Isn't it just a big battery?"

"Well, in theory it extracts zero-point energy from a self-contained pocket of sub-space-time," Rodney said, "meaning a unit that size has enough payload to destroy most of a planet, create a quantum singularity, open a wormhole to another galaxy, and so on and so forth. The underlying physics required to make something like that work completely rewrite everybody's understanding of the universe, even the Tok'ra, not to mention being the most theoretically beautiful thing I've ever seen."

"Really big battery," John said, considering it.

Rodney sighed as the next door opened. "Yes. Come on."

The explosions had stopped, and John wondered if the Jaffa had already detected a change in the energy signatures, if they would really give up that easily. Surely they hadn't blasted their way to the control room yet, and even if they had they couldn't have access the computers. Rodney worked as quick as he could, and after watching him a few times John got the hang of what he was doing—moving the transparent crystal rods around, one two three steps to open, one two three steps to close again. They started leapfrogging their way down the corridor, John working one-handed while he kept the power core tucked under his other arm like a football.

And then they came to the last door, which opened with a creak and a groan into the orange murk of dawn. "Were we really down there all night?" John asked.

"You fell asleep for a little bit," Rodney said. "I didn't—how am I supposed to close this?"

John turned, but he was looking at a mossy rock, not a doorway. Rodney groped at the stone, and yelped when his hand sank into it up to the wrist. "Like that?" John suggested.

"We'd better remember this place, is all I'm saying," Rodney said. "For if we come back."

John picked up a couple of mossy rocks off the ground and arranged them in a rough cross at the foot of the door. "There. X marks the spot. Don't think the Jaffa know that one."

"Don't be so sure," Rodney said, and pulled his hands away from the hidden door with a hiss. When he tried to reach for it again, the hologram concealing the door must've become solid again, because the stone looked like normal stone. "Well, there's that. Come on, let's get out of here."


	13. Chapter 13

They could both move more or less normally now, but at this point stealth was more important than speed. They had to go downhill about a hundred yards, and then up, to the ridge where they'd been observing the Jaffa camp. John stopped there and asked, "Did you bring your binoculars?"

"Yes, in my Bag of Holding," Rodney said. "Why?"

"Want to see if the gliders are still in the air," John said.

"Even if they are, their tracking sensors aren't meant for humanoid targets," Rodney said. "They're not going to able to pinpoint us if we stay under cover."

"Still." He gave Rodney the battery and climbed out among the slumping cliffs and broken rocks. "This'll take a second."

"Be careful," Rodney said, clutching the battery to his chest. "If you get spotted--" But John didn't bother to argue with him, and Rodney didn't actually try to stop him.

He crawled the last length on his belly and squinted down. In the stark shadows of dawn it was hard to make anything out at first, but then he found the black wound in the middle of the camp from the generator explosion—the fire must've taken down four or five buildings, including the command post and, presumably, their tele-ball. A few of the gliders were back on the ground, but he had to assume most of them were still in the air, either searching the woods or waiting for them in orbit. Everything else looked quiet, and he wondered if the majority of the Lion Guard were now across the ridge, trying to break into the lab, or if they'd fanned out to search the forest more effectively, or maybe...

He looked down into the valley, at the banks of the river, and squinted. It was hard to tell under the canopy, but it looked like people were moving up both banks. Lots of people. He saw small flashes of light through the trees. _Shit._

"We've got to hurry," he said as he crawled back to Rodney. "Looks like a big group of them are sweeping up the river."

"That's good, though, right?" Rodney said. "It means they're leaving the lab alone."

"It won't be any good if they kill us," John reminded him.

"Well, of course—I was speaking in relative terms—"

They shimmied down a trail and came out on a ledge, one that commanded a much closer view of the valley. Now it was almost possible to see the two ragged lines of Jaffa, one on each side of the river, disturbing the trees with their passage. No way were they going to be able to break that line, but they could probably outrun it, especially if... "Rodney, I'm going to suggest a stupid plan, and you're gonna yell at me," John said quietly.

"I was waiting for it, actually," Rodney said. "Because if you suggest a diversion, I will tie you up and carry you back to the ship."

"This trail goes right back to it, right?" John said. "This is the way you took to blow up my radio."

"Neither of us is in any shape to outrun Jaffa--"

"I can't fly the ship until you fix it, so if you go ahead--"

"There's no point in me fixing it unless you're there to fly it--"

"—lead them on a wild goose chase--"

"I don't want you to get hurt!" Rodney blurted.

"I've got this thing about suicide missions, okay?" John said.

"Which is?" he demanded, all big eyes and furrowed brow.

"I survive them."

And John jumped down from the ledge, right into the path of the oncoming search parties.

It wasn't like he didn't have a plan. It just wasn't a very good one. Still carrying the battery, he cut towards the river, which was now a ravine, as directly as he could without running straight into the Lion Guard's line. After about two minutes of flat-out running his leg reminded him that they still weren't on speaking terms, but he pushed on, over the trees and rocks. There was that damn branch again, the one that fell on him—but this time he needed speed, not strength. Speed and a hell of a lot of luck.

"Jaffa, kree!"

John kreed, all right. Under a hail of fire he made it to the exposed banks of the river, to the ravine that dropped at least fifteen feet to water that churned around stones and broken logs. There was absolutely no cover at this point, noting to protect him from the guards now taking aim. He spread his arms, to make sure they saw what he was carrying, knew what they'd taken, fell for Rodney's plan.

Then John jumped.

There was a moment in mid-fall when he thought, _this is the dumbest thing I have ever tried to do._ Then his feet hit one of the large, slick boulders at the foot of the ravine, and promptly slid out from under him. He nearly lost the battery but managed not to go into the water; he scrambled for footing and jumped to the next big rock, and then the next, making his way upstream in fits and starts. Above him, the Jaffa were organizing themselves into ranks, were about to fill the ravine with fire and make it into a shooting gallery.

Except the river had eaten out grooves under the banks, and the brush up top created a leafy canopy, and all together John had just enough cover not to die. They could see him, they just couldn't get a good shot at him as long as he kept moving. If Rodney knew what he was doing just then, he'd have had heart failure. John climbed as fast as he could without losing the battery or falling into the water, because the Lion Guard wouldn't need to shoot him he was swept backward into one of the rocks he'd just climbed over.

He just had to get upstream to where he could climb out. He had to make it upstream against the foam, the slick rocks, the creaking and half-rotten logs, the sticky mud. He had to make it before the Jaffa could climb down after him or get ahead of him and cut him off. Piece of cake.

The surface of the river kept exploding into steam where they fired their staff weapons, and then the sides of the ravine began to fall and slump and become a gully densely covered over with willows and twisted pines. John sloshed through knee-deep water in places, skidded on smooth rocks in others, and now he had to slow down so he could try to return fire with his zat; his aim was shit at the moment, but at least he knew certain trees wouldn't be coming after him. He had to take the risk of getting across the river onto the side of the valley where the ship was hidden, and then at least he'd only have half the Jaffa to worry about, assuming none of them had raced around ahead to cut him off.

He took a few quick shots at two Lion Guards on the opposite bank, and then scrambled up the ravine, occasionally flailing in the mud. He had to toss the battery up over the bank ahead of him and then pull himself up with the aid of a low-hanging branch, and it didn't seem possible that he wouldn't get shot in that moment, almost totally exposed.

Instead he found himself standing in front of a heap of dead Jaffa, with Rodney yelling, "It took you long enough! Come on!"

"You were supposed to go back to the ship!" John snapped. He nearly forgot to pick up the battery again.

"What, and leave you to get run down like a demented salmon?" Rodney asked. "As soon as I figured out what you were doing I came back for you. Let's see how they like being ambushed for a change."

"They haven't found the ship yet, have they?" John asked.

"Doesn't look like it," Rodney panted back. "We'll know when they either kill us or don't."

The rocky little meadow among the twisted pines had never looked so welcoming before. John didn't even bother looking for ambush now—all tactics had gone out the window in favor of running like hell. He crashed into the side of the ship and nearly fell down. "Don't say anything," he told Rodney, rubbing his face.

"I would be laughing hysterically if we weren't about to die," Rodney said, pulling John upright.

The dim, odd-smelling interior of their ship was home sweet home, crazy as that was. John tossed the battery aside and went straight to the control room while Rodney went into the engine compartment. "How many Jaffa did you take down?" he asked.

"How should I know?" Rodney called. "Not enough."

"They had ten gliders," John said. "I think you killed two last night in the camp, I might've killed one or two running up the river, there were at least five killed when the generator exploded--"

"Which adds up to too damn many Lion Guards outside," Rodney said. "Every able-bodied guard is going to be coming at us in a few minutes, so can we please not distract me while I'm working?"

John rolled his eyes and spun the cockpit chair around to look out the windows. To see a cluster of Lion Guards standing at the tree line. "Uh, Rodney? It's been a few minutes."

"What? What the hell are you—oh, no no no no no no..."

"Yeah yeah yeah," John said, clutching at the edge of the console. "Are they going to detect us?"

"Well—" There was a small thump and a sizzling sound from the engine compartment. "Shit! Well, are they carrying sensors?"

"No."

"Then just leave the cloak on while I—shit!—no, nevermind, everything under control here, don't, uh, don't panic."

John went into the back, but Rodney was hunched over the grate in the floor and there really wasn't anything constructive to do in such close quarters. He concentrated on packing up the hot plate, the toilet, the water barrel—anything that might rattle around inside the hold and cause problems. Then he went back to the control room, watching a growing line of Jaffa fan out across the meadow. "Rodney, you've got like two minutes," John said.

"Look, I'm going as fast as I can," he snapped back. "Genius cannot be rushed, and if you think you're—oh—oh! Okay, starting the engines."

There was a thrum that was audible all through the ship, and the mangled dashboard in front of John lit up fitfully. "Nothing's exploding," John reported.

"Thank you, that's very helpful." Rodney ran into the control room and sat in the copilot's seat, hands dancing over the controls. "Okay, the engines are at full power, the intertial dampeners...are not, the shields are completely fucked, the hyperdrive is actually bleeding power in a worrisome way--"

"Rodney," John said. "Look up."

Rodney looked up, at the Lion Guards so close they could see the red gleam in their helmets' eyes. He swallowed. "Um. Maybe you should take off now."

"How long to get things patched together, genius?" John asked.

"Too long," Rodney said. "But maybe we can keep the cloak up a little while longer...no, no, oh hell." Rodney looked at him. "Can you actually fly this thing or is it a case of rampant bravado? I really need to know."

John looked at the controls, studied them carefully. Rodney had done his best to restore them, and if they'd been intact John might've figured out one or two things on his own, enough to at least get the ship in the air. As it was they were blacked in place, missing pieces, and despite their best efforts there was a thin stream of smoke coming out of one corner of a display.

But if he didn't fly this thing, they were fucked. John shut his eyes and thought to himself, _Come on, Kharoush, it's now or never._

And when he opened them, everything looked...different. Which mean exactly the same, and least in most ways, like the lack of labels and the black stains and the smoke. But it all made sense now, the Goa'uld script and oddly-placed switches. He reached out and took the controls, and it felt right, it felt as easy as anything he'd ever flown in his life. "Get back to work," John said. "I'll keep it in the ground as long as I can."

"Okay," Rodney said, but he looked worried. "If you're sure you can do this."

"Eh, I'm a year or so out of practice," he said, trying to be light about it. "So if you wanna take over at any point—"

"Just don't crash us again!" Rodney said, scuttling into the back.

John adjusted his hands, shifted in his seat, watched the instruments blink at him semi-comprehensibly. He couldn't actually read all the output, but he could tell that the gauges were all wildly off just by the blinking and the threatening colors. He heard Rodney rattling around in the back some more, and watched the Lion Guards coming ever closer. Ten yards...five...two...

"Here we go!" he called, and then he hit the gas.

The cargo ship was not the sleek, responsive ride he'd always thought of when he imagined flying a spaceship. It was, actually, a great big piece of shit, slow to accelerate and lurchy in steering—or maybe that was just this particular model, suffering as it was from a bad case of crash landing. John tried to lift off straight up, like a helicopter, but there was wobbling and veering, the frame of the whole ship groaned and something popped and sizzled inside the wall. And because it wasn't the smooth, invisible launch John had been aiming for, because they wobbled and vibrated in such an obvious way, of course that line of twenty or thirty Lion Guards knew exactly where to point their staff weapons.

"Not so fast!" Rodney yelled. "The inertial dampeners are still only at sixty--"

The whole ship trembled when the volley of staff fire hit the belly, and John fought to keep them on the course he had in mind—a quick spiral up into orbit, and it was kind of insane for him to even be thinking about flying into orbit, but he was in a spaceship, he was flying a goddamn spaceship up and away—he flying again—he couldn't stop himself from smiling just a little.

At least, until Rodney said, "We just lost the cloak!"

(And maybe even then, just a little.)

"How long until we get the hyperdrive?" John asked.

"Long," Rodney said. "Especially if I have to get the shields up first."

"Forget the shields," John said. He couldn't even see the Lion Guards anymore, they'd risen so fast, and while he definitely felt the acceleration it was no worse than flooring the gas in a car. "If we get out of here fast, we won't need shields."

"The intertial dampeners are going to fail any minute!" Rodney roared.

"Hyperdrive, McKay!"

The ship's proximity alarms warned him before he actually picked them out against the black of space: five gliders in a strafing formation, coming at him. Time to see if what they said about those dogfighting scenes from Star Wars was really true. The controls were sluggish, so John was going to have to think ahead of these guys, which was a little difficult when he was flying a spaceship for the first damn time. Still, evasion was evasion, and he banked hard--

"Aaagh!" McKay cried as the whole ship lurched. "Don't _do_ that!"

"They're right on top of us!" John snapped back. There was definitely something wrong with the inertial dampeners, because he was pretty sure maneuvers like that shouldn't have recoil; he felt pulled in one direction and then the other, just a bit too unsynchronized to cancel each other out. The gliders spread out, jockeying to encircle him, and in a moment of inspiration he swerved as close as he dared towards a pair of them. It was a stupid, reckless move he would never have tried in anything but a spaceship, but as a one-time tactic it worked, because both ships tried to bank sharply away from him and ended up colliding. There wasn't any satisfying fireball, but they fell out of the pursuit, which John counted as a win.

Unfortunately, one of the three remaining ships started to fire, and that meant more smoke, more alarms, more sparks flying out of unhelpful places. Rodney now sounded like he wanted to cry. "Inertial dampeners down to forty percent, we've completely lost communication, and for the record, we still don't have hyperdrive!"

"Then quit yelling at me and get working!" John banked again and felt the lack of inertial dampeners; they were moving insanely fast, and while he'd pulled something like seven Gs before, that had been in a jet cockpit with all the proper safety equipment. This damn cargo ship didn't even come with a seatbelt. If he maneuvered too sharply he was going to hurt either Rodney or himself (or most likely both) but if he didn't keep moving they'd be blown apart. That collision feint wasn't going to work twice, they weren't going to outrun these Jaffa, they didn't have weapons or shields--

Another shot connected, and one entire set of lights on John's console went dark. Shit. "Rodney, tell me you're ready," he said.

"I am like ninety percent ready," Rodney said. "Why?"

"I just lost all the maneuvering thrusters on the right side." Alarms were going off on every gauge he could see, but the steering was now basically impossible; maybe there was some way to compensate for the missing thrusters, but there wasn't time for it, not with a trio of gliders bearing down on them. John wasn't even sure they could stop at the moment without going into a tailspin, and they were making a beeline for the smaller moon, the one Rodney had nicknamed the Hulk. "We could really use hyperdrive right about now," he added.

"Just give me a minute," Rodney said. "Give me a mine...okay, you should see a light on your board labeled with a thing that looks like a Days Inn logo--"

John saw it, and saw it go from an angry, dangerous red to amber. "Now?" he asked.

"Not yet."

The gliders were almost on top of them, according to instruments, probably lining up a kill shot on their engines or something. The moon had gone from the size of an orange to the size of a Volkswagen. "Now, Rodney?"

"Give me one minute!"

"We don't have one minute!"

"If you press that button too early you will tear this ship apart--"

The proximity alarms were wailing again, the gliders were powering weapons, the gray-green soil of the moon filled John's field of vision--

"Now! _NOW!"_

The last thing John remembered clearly was activating the hyperdrive, and the console jumping up into his face.

\\\\\

_They were on a stony beach, just sitting, tossing the odd black rock into the surf. On the horizon, the sun was just starting to come up. "You don't stay with the SGC because they make you stay," Kharoush was saying somewhere off behind him. "They don't even use you as a lightswitch half the time. You stay there because you have nowhere else to be."_

_"Five years to retirement," John said._

_"And then what? Fly traffic helicopters?" Kharoush tossed a stone into foam, where it vanished. "You've got too many secrets, John. You're too solitary. The way you live, there's no difference between Colorado Springs and Antarctica."_

_"If I'd gone to Antarctica, I might still get to fly," John pointed out._

_"If you'd gone to Antarctica, you would never have gone to P96-whatever-the-hell."_

_"Never lost my team."_

_"Never met us."_

_"Right."_

_John threw a stone and watched it sink below the too-slow waves, watched them ripple like mercury as they reflected pink and gold from the sky. "So we're going home," Kharoush said. "You're going to get rid of me, wash your hands of Rodney, and go back to the SGC, where you're going to martyr yourself for an innocent mistake and swallow whatever penance they mete out. You're going to serve five years more and then go fly traffic helicopters."_

_"Sounds like a plan," John said. "Might even be a good one."_

_There was a long pause while they both tossed a few stones. Then: "You're not actually going to do any of that, are you?"_

_He looked over his shoulder at a familiar face, a face he saw every day, a face he hadn't shaved in days. "You saved my ass back there. Might as well return the favor."_

_"That's not how it works," Kharoush warned him._

_"I know." John turned and looked back out over the water. "But I want to fly."_


	14. Chapter 14

It was a strange thing, waking up to a body already in progress. John's awareness still filtered in from a distance, but it wasn't just sounds or sensations coming at him, it was movement, gestures, _thoughts._ Vision returned as a snap into focus, his own hands holding alien tools and coaxing some kind of shiny silver widget back into its proper position, but even though he wasn't the one moving them, they still felt like his hands, his knees, his eyes. He wasn't so much in the back seat as the copilot's chair. Also, his head hurt like a son of a bitch.

_Took you long enough,_ were the thoughts next to his, close enough to touch but still clear and wholly separate.

_You're one to talk,_ John shot back.

Kharoush's amusement bubbled across wordlessly; out loud, in one of those bizarrely distorted bass voices, he announced, "He's awake."

There was a bang and a curse from somewhere underneath, and Rodney suddenly climbed out of an open square in the floor. He was down to a t-shirt and covered in grime; John realized the inside of the ship was oppressively hot, and in one of those disorienting bursts of knowledge he understood that this was some glitch in the life support system, or a coolant system, or possibly both together; but they at least were getting clean air, which was the most important part. Rodney's eyes were huge, and he had a small smile on his face, like he was hopeful but afraid to hope. "Really? I mean, are you sure?"

And just like that, John was in charge again; there was nothing sudden about it, no actual feeling of transition, just the awareness that Kharoush was standing back and waiting on him. He set the tools down. "I think he'd be the first to know, McKay."

Rodney's grin lit up the whole ship (which quite frankly, needed the illumination). "Oh, thank god," he said, clambering out of the hole in the floor. "I was afraid—I mean, I got banged around pretty bad when we went into hyperspace, but as least I was laying down, you were thrown clear across the room and even though Kharoush said you were fine there was an awful lot of blood and it's so easy to damage the frontal lobes of the brain and I really thought--"

"Hey." It suddenly seemed like the easiest thing in the world to reach over and grab Rodney's shoulder, silencing him. "I'm okay. We made it out of there."

"Well, of course we did," Rodney said. "Genius, remember?" He paused, smile faltering. "And, um, and you weren't flying too badly. You know, for an amateur."

John rolled his eyes. "Thanks, McKay."

"I'm only saying that just because you think you're a character from Top Gun--"

"I meant it," John clarified, giving Rodney's shoulder another squeeze. "Thanks. You know, for everything."

"Um. You too," Rodney said, then flushed even redder and shrugged John's hand away. "Um. Yes. Work to do, busy busy, the navigation sensors won't fix themselves..."

The jump into hyperspace had nearly torn the ship in half, and so while they weren't entirely back to square one with repairs, a lot of good work had been undone. At least the distribution coil had held this time; Rodney had also put every single other part they'd stolen to good use, and cannibalized other systems (like, for instance, the thermostat) to establish minimum functionality in others (like navigation). "We'll have to land when we get to the outpost, and we won't be able to identify ourselves until we're almost right on top of them, so this might be a, uh, a warm reception," Rodney said.

"As long as we get there in one piece," John said.

"Hmm." Rodney prodded at a crystal array. "Well, I can guarantee a couple of large ones."

John reached over him to push a connecting rod back into its socket. "Hey, you keep it together and I'll get it down."

"So you say," Rodney said. He popped out a crystal and inspected it for chips.

John leaned against the bulkhead and swiped at the sweat on the back of his neck. _And my reception?_ he wondered.

_Don't fear,_ Kharoush said. _You will be welcomed as any new host._

_Even though I'm from the SGC?_

_We won't hold that against you._

"The others," Rodney said suddenly, echoing this conversation, "they'll be, uh, surprised to see you, but I can explain everything. Or Kharoush can."

John nodded. "They gonna do anything for Nurlan, you think?"

Rodney shrugged, not looking up. "Nothing official, I think, but maybe we could....I mean, it's really up to you."

And by _you_ he didn't mean John. "I would like that," Kharoush said out loud. "When we have time."

"Which will probably be shortly after Hell freezes over," Rodney groused without actual rancor. "But...yeah. As soon as there's time."

They didn't actually know where they were, though Rodney had a fairly good idea based entirely on passive sensor observations and trigonometry. The important thing was that Inanna didn't know either, so her Lion Guard and her designs on John were a safe distance away. The only thing constraining their time was the protein paste and a bag of crushed and wilted greens that Rodney had seen fit to stash away, since they still needed to eat; but even that was enough to last for days, considering how much they'd already tightened their belts. (Well, John had tightened his—Rodney still bolted his food and then stared at John's with covetous eyes, but knew better than to make a move on it.) So they could work on repairs almost, though not quite, at their leisure: taking the time to do everything carefully, do everything right, and still get six or seven hours of sleep a night. Or whatever they chose to label a night out here, without a sun or horizon to define it.

They had the luxury of time out here, but it still came with a deadline, and John thought for a long time about how to make the most of it.

///

John and Kharoush made a pet project of the water recyclers, for the stated purpose of maintaining a drinking water supply, and the stealth purpose of taking showers again. The water came out lukewarm and with a chemical smell, but it was still better than nothing, especially when he located the soap in the tangled mess of their cargo.

This time, John didn't feel like messing around with curtains and clotheslines. He spread a towel out right in front of the sink, stripped down and started washing up. Rodney, when he actually noticed what John was up to, dropped a very important crystal. "What are you doing?" he yelped, hitting octaves most grown men rarely approached.

"I stink," John said casually. "You stink. The ship stinks. Ring any bells?"

"We're about thirty-six hours of hard work away from proper showers," Rodney said weakly. John noticed he was looking very hard at his tools.

"But we can shave now," John pointed out. "Not to mention cool off a little." He flicked a little water at Rodney and laughed at his flailing, sputtering response. "C'mon, take a break."

"You're in an awfully good mood," Rodney said glumly, and glared at him with a crooked little frown. "That glad to be rid of me, I suppose."

John thought about how to respond to that while he carefully shaved around his mouth, making all the silly shaving faces he could think of. "What makes you think that?" he finally asked.

"Well, I mean...you're all..you, and I'm...I'm me," Rodney said, filling in his pauses with abrupt gestures. "And while you've been far from the most unpleasant person I could've been stuck with, I'm not deluding myself that you actually would've chosen to hang out with me if we'd met under any other circumstances."

"But we didn't meet under other circumstances," John pointed out. "We're here and now."

Rodney stared at him. "Okay, Sheppard, can we just clarify whether or not you're messing around with me? Because I'm completely unable to tell."

John dunked his whole head in the basin and then shook out like a dog. "I'm just saying what I think," he said. "Nothing complicated about that."

"Everything about people is complicated," Rodney said mournfully. "And I am not exactly good with people."

John smiled at him. "Don't sweat it, Rodney. I'm not messing with you."

"All right," he said warily, but when John sprawled out on top of his blanket to dry out Rodney deliberately looked away.

_(You're freaking him out,_ Kharoush warned.

_(You would think he'd have a high freak-out threshold, all things considered._

_(All things considered, I think his own species is the one that freaks him out the most.)_

Rodney and Kharoush tag-teamed work on the navigation sensors late into the night, trying to make certain nothing was going to explode on activation, and the end result was that by morning (for their distorted spaceship values of morning) they knew where they were, which was nowhere at all. "Basically, it's a star desert," Rodney explained, not because Kharoush hadn't filled John in but because Rodney liked to talk and John didn't mind listening. "A gap between the spiral arms of the galaxy. There's literally nothing but hard vacuum for light years in every direction. No Goa'uld, no Tok'ra, no nothing."

"Which is good," John said. "Nobody to trip over us while we're defenseless."

"Which is bad," Rodney reminded him, "because it's going to take us longer than I thought to get back to the nearest Tok'ra base. Every hour of the trip is another hour this mess has to hold together, and I may be a genius, but I am not a miracle worker."

"If it gets us there, I can land it," John said. "We can shut down anything we don't need to get us there."

"That's going to include the water recyclers."

"Which is why you ought to take your shower now," John said, "because once we land we're gonna get dragged off into debriefings until the heat death of the universe, right?"

"Oh, Kharoush told you about those?" Rodney said, and it sounded sarcastic, but he also didn't meet John's eyes. Rodney hung a curtain to wash up, and put a shirt back on before he came out of hiding.

They went over every crystal and connector in the engine, the navigation computers, the hyperdrive, the inertial dampeners—anything that might possibly go bad on them during the last few hours to home. Rodney also worked on an automated program that would compensate for the dead thrusters on the right side, after lecturing John on why nothing short of a spacewalk was going to fix that, a spacewalk they were entirely unequipped to perform. They had to disassemble half of the copilot's console to repair the main controls, and Kharoush helped John through the delicate process of patching high-voltage cables together so no power was being eaten up by such useless subsystems as the radio.

John and Rodney still slept on pallets inches apart, head to head, and sometimes before sleep they still talked about comic books and sci-fi movies. But Rodney seemed quiet and distant and was really quite bad at faking sleep. Rodney kept staring at John with confused and miserable expressions when he didn't think John could see him. Rodney was unhappy, and John wasn't sure what he could say to him, but he was starting to think that he was going to have to take a direct approach.

///

Rodney insisted on personally checking everything John did, and occasionally doing it over in the exact same way, just to be sure. He insisted on crawling into inadvisable places to visually verify the results of a computer diagnostic. He insisted on running a simulation before John, Tanys and Kharoush collectively nixed it. "If this damages anything, we have no way of repairing it," Rodney warned direly. "You though I was joking about tying things together with string but I really wasn't."

"Rodney," John said. "We have to turn it on eventually."

"All right," he said. "I just wanted to warn you that if anything explodes--"

_"Rodney."_

"Fine, fine..." Rodney took a deep breath. "Okay. Here goes nothing..."

He revved up the engines and reconnected the distribution coil. Engines, hyperdrive, inertial dampeners, navigation—the only things that counted—lit up smoothly and calmly. There was one faint popping sound, but everything stayed running, and when it had been running for a full thirty seconds John grinned. "You did it."

"We did it," Rodney said, sounding stunned. "Oh my god, we actually did it. I'm a _genius."_

"That's what you keep saying," John reminded him as he clapped in on the shoulder

"Oh, please, like there's any point in modesty," Rodney said, but he was grinning now, ear to ear, and for John it seemed obvious that the next thing to do was to pull him closer, to lean in, to kiss him on the mouth.

There was a moment of stillness, and then Rodney leapt backward, actually pressing himself against the bulkhead. "What the hell?" he said.

"Don't tell me you never been kissed before, McKay," John said.

"No, seriously," Rodney said, and suddenly he looked angry. "Are you messing with me or not?"

"Why do you think I'm messing with you?"

"Because you don't want me," Rodney said ruthlessly. "You're military and you're straight and you're going to get rid of Kharoush and go back to Earth and there's nothing that's going to happen here beyond a...a _pity fuck,_ and I may not have a whole lot of self-respect in that regard but I do have some, Major, so please don't...just don't, okay?"

John reached out and touched the back of Rodney's hand, but Rodney pulled away and folded his arms over his chest with a glare. "What makes you think I'm straight, Rodney?" John asked.

Rodney's eyes went very, very wide. "Are you...I mean, you can't be."

"It's called 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' for a reason," John reminded him.

"Oh," Rodney said, very soft and very small.

Now John tried putting his hand on Rodney's knee, pressing his fingers very, very lightly into the coarse weave of his trousers, the pattern of different stains. "What makes you think I'm leaving after this?" he asked.

"Did you know I never liked the Socratic method?" Rodney asked. "You told me you were leaving. You practically demanded I get rid of Kharoush even if it killed you."

"I changed my mind," John said.

"You changed--" Rodney spluttered and stared at him. "You don't just change your mind about this kind of thing!"

"I really changed my mind," John said.

"I don't believe you," Rodney said mulishly.

Kharoush stepped forward. "He really just changed his mind," he said.

It was gratifying that for about thirty seconds solid, Rodney couldn't seem to speak. His mouth moved, and little strangled syllables made their way up out of his throat, but for the most part he just stared at John with an expression that managed to mingle shock and delight and affection and sheer abject terror. "You changed your mind," he finally said, dully.

"Yeah," John said, without moving his hand from Rodney's leg. "Turns out I kinda like having you guys around."

"And you really want to..." Rodney stammered. "I mean, with me? And you know what you're doing?"

"I've been warned," John said. "Now, you wanna try that again?"

"Oh, hell, yes," Rodney said feverishly, and nearly jumped into John's lap.

It was still hot and stuffy in the cargo hold, and they had still been bathing from buckets and sinks for too many weeks, and John had a fifteen o'clock shadow and Rodney was heavy; it was still a good kiss, all warm and eager and wet. John grabbed at Rodney's shoulders and Rodney cupped the back of his head, sinking fingers into his hair, practically holding him down. "I've been thinking about this for a really long time," he suddenly muttered, pulling back just far enough to draw breath.

"I kinda figured," John said. "What with calling me pretty all the time."

Rodney snickered, but it ended with a sigh when John slid his hands under Rodney's filthy shirt. Since John had given up on wearing any shirt at all, there was nothing to stop Rodney returning the favor, fanning those big hands out over John's shoulders and then sliding them down, stopping with another hesitant flutter at his waistband. John didn't have any of the same inhibitions, and when he proved it, Rodney moaned.

And yeah, Kharoush was there—of course he was there, of course they were in this together. But it wasn't as strange as John had feared. He was there but he wasn't there, in a way, because for a moment they had the same thoughts, the same intentions, the same urgent desires. It didn't matter which of them traced Rodney's lips with his tongue, or grabbed at Rodney's thighs with urgent hands; it didn't make much difference if the impulse came from John or Kharoush or both, because for that moment they were literally of one mind.

And for that moment, he pulled Rodney close, and then pulled him down to the floor.

\\\\\

Of course, afterwards, John felt the need to point out, _I thought symbiotes didn't care about sex._

_I never said we didn't care about sex,_ Kharoush said. _I said it wasn't that important to us. That doesn't mean we don't_ enjoy _it._

_Is that right?_

_We have the same body, John. I feel as you feel._

John smiled. _So was it good for you?_

_It has been a long time since I have been able to give such pleasure to my mate,_ Kharoush said prissily, and John chuckled quietly. Rodney didn't stir.

They had made it, with minimal casualties, to the sleeping pallets, which Rodney had shoved together to better accommodate two grown men. Rodney was now sound asleep with his face mashed into the pillow, but he kept one of his arms looped tightly around one of John's, as if afraid that he might wake up and find it had all been a dream. Despite the heat, John tucked his face against the nape of Rodney's neck, studying the patterns of scar tissue up close.

_So what happens next?_ John asked. He wasn't talking about Rodney.

_You really don't know?_ Kharoush asked.

_You may have noticed I'm not really a forward-planning kind of guy._

_Now you are Tok'ra,_ Kharoush said, as if it were the simplest thing in the world. _Now we go back to the work we've been doing for thousands of years._

_What happens for me, though?_ John asked. _Somehow I don't think the SGC is really gonna let me go quietly._

_Whyever not?_ Kharoush asked with feigned shock. _Are we not allies?_

_They went to an awful lot of trouble to get me and my genes on their side._

_And we will go to equal lengths to support your choice._

John nodded in the darkness and silence of the hold, and pressed his face a little closer to Rodney's neck. Rodney stirred, smacking his lips a little, and scooted away from John slightly to let a breeze pass between them and dry the sticky sweat. John kissed his shoulder, softly, and then rolled away onto his back, leaving one arm trapped under Rodney's neck as a sign and promise. (And also because he couldn't feel his hand.)

"Mmmmph?" Rodney said quietly, not really awake.

"Right here," John said, and that seemed to be enough.


	15. Chapter 15

The moment they let John out of the conference room, he took off down the corridor, walking without a destination except _away from here._ He walked as fast as he could, but sadly, it wasn't quite fast enough.

"Major!"

Jack O'Neill's voice went through him like a stake, pinning him to the spot. _Relax,_ Kharoush reminded him. _He likes you._

But the Tok'ra, not so much, John reminded him. "Sir," he said out loud, turning around.

O'Neill had loosened his tie and unbuttoned his jacket; over his shoulder, the other Tok'ra diplomats were standing in a tight cluster, and Hank Landry's face was slowly returning to its normal color. "Got somewhere better to be?" O'Neill asked.

"Just off to look for Dr. McKay, sir," John said. "He didn't come back after the last coffee break, and I'm kind of afraid he might've OD'd."

"Nah, he's probably just off abusing Carter," O'Neill said.

"Which is another reason to go after him," John said, and half-turned away.

"Sheppard," O'Neill said gravely, and John froze again. The general just stared at him for a minute, and then asked quietly, "You serious about this?"

"Never been more serious in my life, sir," John answered honestly.

O'Neill sighed and looked away. "Hell of a thing," he muttered.

John didn't say anything; he'd spent over a week trying to justify himself to what felt like half the Air Force, talking with doctors and psychiatrists and lawyers, answering the same questions over and over. The first big hurdle had been to convince them he was really himself, and not under Kharoush's thumb; then, that he hadn't been brainwashed, was not suffering from Stockholm Syndrome or PTSD or any other crisis that impaired his judgment; then, that he really and honestly wanted to leave. The word _defector_ hadn't been said out loud, nor _liar,_ nor _traitor;_ he'd been grilled in detail on how his team members died, but nobody breathed the word _fragging._ Nobody had said anything, but everything had been implied at one point or another, and John was frankly tired of it.

He was tired of fighting the Air Force, and ready to go home. And home, at the moment, was most likely where the coffee was.

When John didn't respond to him right away, O'Neill cleared his throat. "I can't help but take this a little personally, you know," he said. "I pulled a lot of strings to keep you out of Antarctica."

"I know that, sir, and I'm grateful," John said. "But I don't think I ever really belonged here."

"But you do with the Tok'ra," O'Neill said, dark eyes boring into John.

"Yeah," John said simply. "I do."

O'Neill broke his stare and looked down with a sigh. "Hell of a thing," he repeated, shaking his head slightly. "Might've been easier on all of us if you hadn't come back at all."

"That would be going AWOL, sir," John deadpanned. "That would be wrong."

"Oh, right," O'Neill said, just as dry. "I'm sure it never even crossed your mind."

In truth, he'd discussed it with Rodney, after the first set of reports and debriefings and introductions, after they'd made burnt offerings to a false god in Nurlan's name. Well, Rodney had brought it up, arguing that what the SGC didn't find out couldn't hurt them. Tanys had thought it was a brilliant solution to a potentially complicated problem. Even Kharoush worried John was just looking for one last round of self-flagellation. He'd had to argue with all of them, trying to make them see that he needed to do this the right way around; he needed to keep these promises. He was pretty sure Kharoush, at least, understood, but Rodney was definitely only here to humor him, and that was why he'd snuck off during the break. Well, that, and this was diplomacy, and Rodney was...himself.

"You don't have much to worry about, Major," O'Neill continued after a moment of silence. "When it comes down to it, it's not like we can really keep you here. Everything else is just covering asses and stroking egos."

"Sounds kinky," John said.

O'Neill laughed slightly, seemingly in spite of himself. "Go rescue Carter for me, Major," he said. "I have to go shake hands with people."

"Good luck, sir," John said earnestly, and made his escape.

It was unsettling to be back in the SGC, after all this time; strange to walk down the concrete halls, past the uniformed airmen and lab-coated scientists, alongside uniformed gate teams going to and from their assignments. The Tok'ra bases, for all their exotic alienness, had been easier; they were both strange and strangely familiar, and the other Tok'ra accepted John easily on whatever terms he offered, and they welcomed him as a new comrade even as they welcomed Kharoush back. And Kharoush was always with him, smoothing over the edges and filling in the gaps, backing him up. They were working their way into a comfortable rhythm, trading back and forth, and while it still occasionally hit John with stunning force that his life had become _weird,_ he couldn't necessarily say it was a _bad_ weird.

(There was also the sex thing. The Tok'ra, as it turned out, didn't believe in keeping secrets—or building doors—and so it became common knowledge that he and Rodney were together. Or, rather, that Kharoush and Tanys were _back_ together, as most people seemed to regard it. On one hand, it meant that there was no reason for them not to spend every night in the same bed, and that was very nice, except for the whole doors thing. On the other hand, John had been basically closeted for about thirty years, and now he'd come out fast enough to cause whiplash.)

And then there was the SGC. All the old places and all the old faces, the full weight of habits and expectations. The people with clearance to know about P96-402 looked at him with wariness, even outright suspicion, saying _liar_ and _defector_ and _spy_ with their eyes; the rest just treated him like they always had, not exactly unfriendly, just professional and indifferent. Here Kharoush held himself back for fear of alarming the natives, and it wasn't like he knew anything about Earth anyway; it was up to John to shoulder the full burden of interaction, except all the old scripts he used to rely on were suddenly unavailable. It was like an alternate universe, a little, except he knew full well that nothing here had actually changed; the problem was that he had.

Despite O'Neill's suggestion, John actually tracked Rodney down in an empty lab. As predicted, he had a scattering of empty coffee cups around him, and he was heavily editing a long equation on a whiteboard. "Somehow I don't think Bill's gonna appreciate that," John said as he came it.

"Bill needs to learn to deal with disappointment," Rodney declared. He didn't look up until he'd finished a particularly illegible footnote, and when he did, his back cracked. "Well? Did they make a decision yet?"

"Not yet," John said. "I think they've pretty much agreed to trade that zed thingy--"

"ZPM," Rodney supplied.

"—right, trade that for me, but that Woolsey guy keeps going on about precedents, and I think the Russian is just categorically freaked out by symbiotes." John stole a sip from the only cup with any coffee in it; it was cold.

"Precedents?" Rodney echoed. "Are you serious? Is he afraid we're going to start stalking SG teams around the galaxy, waiting to shanghai them?"

"I think he used the word 'press gang,' but yeah, pretty much." John shrugged. "O'Neill said he'd do what he could to wrap it up quicker. He seems pretty cool with it, all things considered."

For a moment Rodney looked like he wanted to make a dire imprecation about O'Neill's coolness, but Tanys said, "We can take him at his word. For all he suspects us, he has been a responsible ally of the Tok'ra, in spite of several negative experiences."

"He is also more clever than he lets on," Kharoush pointed out.

"Which isn't exactly difficult," Rodney muttered.

John studied the whiteboard, trying to pick out familiar variables among the equations. "Either way, they can't drag it out much longer. I think."

"You clearly don't know much about diplomacy," Rodney huffed.

"Oh, like you do."

"Well, no," he admitted, "but I've sat in on plenty of faculty meetings and defense committee and the like, and that's almost the same thing. Worse, actually, because at least physicists can eventually _prove_ something, whereas diplomats studied things like _political science_ where you're lucky to find a pie graph that actually adds up to one hundred." He started nervously tidying up his empties, and added, "We could always deploy the nuclear option, you know."

_Nuclear option_ being code for _making out on the conference room table,_ which would've been a nice diversion, but John wasn't quite ready to burn all those bridges yet; he'd convinced the rest of the Tok'ra to keep that little fact on the down-low for now, just in case he still had a career to salvage. "I don't think it's quite that desperate," he said. "Though if the British guy gets up to talk again, I might consider it."

"Your loss," Rodney said huffily. "You want to get some coffee?"

"I think I'm cutting you off for the day," John said. "The meeting's going to start again in like five minutes, anyway."

Rodney sighed and surveyed the lab, and all the marked-up equations therein. "I think my work here is done, so I suppose I have no choice but to join you again."

"Rumor mill says you're supposed to be chasing after Colonel Carter," John told him as they left.

"She's offworld this week, actually," Rodney said. "Funny how that works out."

"Real coincidence," John said dryly, which earned him a glare.

They were actually a little late getting back into the conference room, and it spoke volumes about the direction of the negotiations that nobody had minded John's absence. Garshaw was speaking for the Tok'ra, something about mutual respect and cooperation, but when O'Neill saw John and Rodney slip in he cleared his throat loudly and say, "Councillor, if I may, I think I have an idea that can satisfy everyone at this table."

Garshaw blinked at him. "Of course, General."

O'Neill stood up and smoothed out the front of his jacket. "I think, with all the discussion here about obligations and responsibilities, we've really overlooked the opportunity that's presented itself to us. Since the tragic passing of Jacob Carter and his symbiote Selmak, there has been a regrettable lapse in the exchange of information and technologies between our two peoples, and our relations aren't exactly what they could be, I think we all agree.

"Therefore, with the permission of the delegates from the IOA," and here he nodded at Woolsey and the others, who looked grumpy but not particularly confused, like they already knew what he was going to say, "and with the consent of the Tok'ra, I would like to suggest that Major Sheppard be reassigned as a liaison officer to the High Council, with the express responsibility of communicating Earth's interests and concerns to the council and vice-versa."

Rodney's mouth fell open before O'Neill was entirely finished with this speech. While John's brain spun blankly, Kharoush said softly, _I have decided I like this one._

_I think he might be insane,_ John said.

_But what glorious madness._

Garshaw looked at the other Tok'ra delegates, and at John, before saying evenly, "It is a promising proposal, General, and one that we do not take lightly, but are you quite certain that Major Sheppard and Kharoush are...suited...for such duties?"

"Ma'am, I can't think of anyone better," O'Neill said, and even kept a straight face.

Tanys suddenly spoke up, with a little frown between his eyebrows that suggested Rodney really did not like what he had to say. "If I may speak up—I would be more than happy to assist Major Sheppard in these duties, if he requires more technical expertise."

This was an even more laughable idea, but nobody seemed to have the nerve to say so out loud and to Rodney's face. Instead, Garshaw said, "If we may have a moment to deliberate, General?"

"Of course," O'Neill said. "Come on, Dick, let's go get coffee."

As the IOA and SGC delegates filed out, Rodney hissed under his breath, "Can I just say this is a very bad idea?"

"I dunno," John allowed. "Gives us an excuse to visit the old homeworld once in a while. Bring back some coffee and peanut butter."

"I don't care. I vote for the nuclear option." He scowled at O'Neill's back as the door finally shut.

And then all eyes were on John. "Your thoughts?" Garshaw asked.

He chose his words carefully. "I think this is General O'Neill's way of giving me an out, ma'am. It saves the IOA some face, but it's not like they can realistically expect to dictate my actions away from Earth."

"And this liaison idea?" asked one of the other delegates, a beardly fellow named Aldheim. "Do you think it has merit?"

Kharoush said, "I think we will need a greater degree of cooperation with Earth than we have ever had before to fully exploit the genetics laboratory. This could be a way to secure that cooperation." He paused. "And while I realize I am hardly your first choice for a diplomat, I do enjoy a challenge."

"That's what I'm afraid of," Aldheim's host muttered.

"I do not wish for you to face a conflict of loyalties, John," Garshaw said, and he didn't miss her choice of address for him. "Your responsibilities should never be in doubt."

"They won't be," John assured her. "As long as I'm doing the right thing."

That raised a few eyebrows, including Rodney's—or maybe that was Tanys—but Kharoush chuckled. _I knew there was a reason I liked you._

_Just remember you said that when we get into trouble._

"Then it seems we are agreed," Garshaw said. "We can leave immediately, unless John has any affairs on this world he must put in order."

He'd already taken care of most of that, actually—or the original MIA declaration had. In between interviews and interrogations, he'd broken the lease on his house in Colorado Springs, sold off or given away most of his stuff, paid visits to the families of his fallen team mates. He'd called up his father and only realized when the call connected that he really had nothing to say to him. That sort of thing.

But he said, "Yeah, I could use a day or two," anyway, and nudged Rodney's leg under the table. Rodney blinked at him in non-comprehension. John nudged him again. Rodney nudged him back, looking annoyed. John rolled his eyes and hissed _"Nuclear option"_ at him as Aldheim called the others back into the room, and then Rodney's eyes got big, and he smirked. "Or, you know, anything else you might want to do," John added.

"I could think of a couple things," Rodney said, and then made one of those startling gear shifts. "Wanna go to Vancouver?"

"What's in Vancouver?" John asked warily.

"Oh, just," Rodney looked down at his hands. "Somebody I might want to see. If she wants to see me. Maybe."

The IOA people were settling into their chairs, and it looked like Garshaw was getting ready to start talking. John turned to face the front. "Vancouver sounds great, then," he murmured to Rodney, and pressed their legs together under the table.


End file.
